[postgis-users] PostgreSQL/PostGIS as a bundled database

[Paul Ramsey]

A complete Win32 native version of PostgreSQL is supposed to occur with the 
7.4 release. IE: in about 6 months. In the meantime, there are definately 
some issues around doing a clean Win32 bundling, as you have noted...

One un-mentioned possibility is seeing if redistribution rights to one of the 
existing Win32 ports are available for your client. There was a beta Win32 
port floating around about 3 months ago which some on the list tested, and 
may have even tried compiling PostGIS against.

On Saturday 28 December 2002 09:36, Frank Warmerdam wrote:

>   o Currently on Windows a Postgres installation has to be built in the
> Cygwin environment, right?  How much of that is required at run-time?  I am
> hoping all we would need to include out of Cygwin in the install is one or
> two runtime DLLs.  Are there required components of Postgres that would
> depend on Cygwin shell scripts or external commands?

Some of the DBA utilities, like initdb and createuser depend on shell scripts. 
Someone on the HACKERS list mentioned compiling a minimal install package for 
windows recently, I would suggest a quick peruse of the archive there.

>   o To allow multiple machines on the LAN to access it the db instance
> would need to be started in the mode where you can connect to it by
> internet socket.  In this case it would be important to install with user
> supplied passwords, right?

You could hack up your initial template files to have some pre-existing users 
with known passwords, I suppose.

>   o I am assuming that the client application would use the Win32 builds of
>     libpq and so would have no direct dependency on Cygwin.  Anyone using
> this method now?  (I would really like to get this working in OGR but
> haven't had the time to try it).

Yep, you can do completely cygwin independant clients with a win32 libpq.

>   o How big (roughly) is a Postgres install with a database initialized but
>     no spatial data loaded?  An Oracle 8.1.7 installation on Windows seems
> to be on the order of 1GB and apparently an Oracle 9 base install is
> substantially larger.  I am hoping the Postgres installed with an empty db
> initialized would be less than 100MB.

Very small, probably less that 30MB.

>   o How easy is it to ensure that postgres is started at boot up?  Can it
> be made an NT service?  Is this the best approach?  On unix I would ensure
> that "pg_ctl start -o -i " was called from a boot script.  What is the
> equivelent to that on NT?

There are some fiddles, but a startup service is eminantly doable. You also 
need to bundle the IPC daemon, which also runs as a service.

>   o What does a client install need?  Just the primary application and
>     libpq.dll, right?   The client install should only need to know the
>     machine name to connect to, right?  Is there a default port for
> postgres? would there be a reason to change it?

Just libpq. Would need to know the server name. The default port is 5432. No 
particular reason to change it.

>   o What issues of conflicts with other software might we encounter? 
> Should we run postgres on a different port to ensure we don't conflict with
> any other postgres instance that might exist on the clients systems?  Are
> there issues of picking up the wrong cygwin DLLs at runtime if the user has
> another cygwin version installed?

Yes, I would flag all those as potential issues, DLL hell being what it is :) 
However, one can only exercise so much control over a clients machine. 

>   o What would be necessary if we also wanted the database to be ODBC
>     accessable for access from other windows applications?  Are there good
>     ODBC drivers for postgres on windows?  Are there other complicating
>     issues to using them?

There are ODBC drivers available, and I do not think they have complicating 
factors. Whether they are "good" seems to be a matter of some debate. We have 
on occasion found them to be less than industrial strength, but mostly with 
respect to trying to push very large objects through them.

> PS. I am working on Oracle Spatial support for OGR right now.  I haven't
>      reviewed the Oracle 9 Spatial docs yet, but in Oracle 8 there seems to
>      be very little OGC SFSQL support.  There is no apparent way to get
>      geometries in WKT or WKB formats for instance.  However, the
> coordinate systems are in WKT format.  All in all I am disappointed so far
> with the OGC standards compliance in Oracle Spatial.

Ditto ditto ditto. Oracle Spatial 9i has some very good features, but 
standards compliance is not among them. 8i I think is not a very good product 
at all. 9i is very acceptable. 10i sounds so far like it could be extremely 
impressive (support for topology in the database, of course the devil is in 
the implementation :).