PostGIS 1.5.0 Release

The 1.5.0 release of PostGIS is now available. This is a major release adding a significant number of new features including:

  • New "geography" type for managing geodetic (lat/lon) data
  • Performance-enhanced distance calculations
  • GML and KML format readers
  • Improved shape loading GUI
  • And more!

Release Notes

Important Changes
  • =~ operator now indicates bounding box equality, not feature equality
  • GEOS 3.1 is now the minimum accepted version of GEOS
  • GEOS 3.2 is needed if you want to use enhanced buffering features and ST_HausdorffDistance
  • GEOS, LibXML2, and Proj4 are now mandatory dependencies
New Features
  • Added Hausdorff distance calculations (#209) (Vincent Picavet)
  • Added parameters argument to ST_Buffer operation to support one-sided buffering and other buffering styles (Sandro Santilli)
  • Performance improvements to ST_Distance (Nicklas Avén)
  • Addition of other Distance related visualization and analysis functions (Nicklas Avén)
  • ST_ClosestPoint
  • ST_DFullyWithin
  • ST_LongestLine
  • ST_MaxDistance
  • ST_ShortestLine
  • KML, GML input via ST_GeomFromGML and ST_GeomFromKML (Olivier Courtin)
  • Extract homogeneous collection with ST_CollectionExtract (Paul Ramsey)
  • Add measure values to existing linestring with ST_AddMeasure (Paul Ramsey)
  • History table implementation in utils (George Silva)
  • Win32 support and improvement of core shp2pgsql-gui (Mark Cave-Ayland)
  • In place 'make check' support (Paul Ramsey)
  • Geography type and supporting functions
    • Spherical algorithms from Dave Skea
    • Object/index implementation from Paul Ramsey
    • Selectivitiy implementation from Mark Cave-Ayland
    • Serializations (KML, GML, JSON) from Olivier Courtin
    • ST_Area, ST_Distance, ST_DWithin, ST_GeogFromText, ST_GeogFromWKB, ST_Intersects, ST_Covers, ST_Buffer
  • Documentation updates and improvements (Regina Obe, Kevin Neufeld)
  • Testing and quality control (Regina Obe)
  • PostGIS 1.5 support PostgreSQL 8.5 trunk (Guillaume Lelarge)
  • Many, many other changes