This is major news: after 26 months of development, the open source geospatial database PostGIS 2.0 has been released. PostGIS is one of the best spatial database system there is. It even has been recently identified as better than Oracle Spatial.
The new features:
- Raster data and raster/vector analysis in the database
- Topological models to handle objects with shared boundaries
- PostgreSQL typmod integration, for an automagical geometry_columns table
- 3D and 4D indexing
- Index-based high performance nearest-neighbour searching
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Many more vector functions including
- ST_Split
- ST_Node
- ST_MakeValid
- ST_OffsetCurve
- ST_ConcaveHull
- ST_AsX3D
- ST_GeomFromGeoJSON
- ST_3DDistance
- Integration with the PostgreSQL 9.1 extension system
- Improved commandline shapefile loader/dumper
- Multi-file import support in the shapefile GUI
- Multi-table export support in the shapefile GUI
- A geo-coder optimized for free US Census TIGER (2010) data