Still catching up geonews, this is a major one, the mature open source geospatial database PostGIS 2.1.0 has been released.

In short, "This release contains a ton of speed improvements, function additions , and super sexy new features. It has been over a year in the making. New functions itemized here". The highlights:

• "More terrain analysis functions. In addition so slope and aspect calculations, there are now also roughness, Topographic Position Index and Terrain Ruggedness Index.
• Tiling large rasters into small rasters with ST_Tile. This is useful for analyses that work best on large rasters, but are served out as results best as small tiles. The raster opposite of ST_Tile is ST_Union, which has received performance improvements in 2.1
• New geocoding engine. The TIGER geocoder that has shipped with PostGIS for several years has been enhanced using the address normalization engine from PACG. As a result, batch geocoding is an order of magnitude faster.
• New selectivity calculations, supporting N-D and geographic indexes, as well as improved join selectivity calculations. Will provide generally improved query planning for complex SQL.
• Performance enhancement by up to 20x for ST_Distance calculations on geography.
• Delaunay triangulation inside the database with ST_DelaunayTriangles.
• Performance and functionality enhancements to ST_MapAlgebra, allowing even more crazy in-database raster analytics."

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