PostGIS Geomedia Dataserver

At the Hexagon conference, Intergraph released a GeoMedia data server for PostGIS. For those that haven’t heard of PostGIS, it’s a FANTASTIC open source and free spatial database. Behind, Oracle Spatial, it’s probably the most powerful spatial database in the market.

The data server can be downloaded from CodePlex. The data server is very easy to install. If you already have an existing PostGIS database, you only need to run the “Register.bat” batch script and the data server will be installed in GeoMedia. Like GeoMedia/Oracle, for read-only connections, you don’t even need to create a metadata schema! If you’d like to be able to PostGIS data, you’ll need to use the database utilities that come with the data server and setup the application metadata.

For those that are new to PostGIS, Intergraph provides a very nice PostGISGDOUserInfo.txt file that will guide you through the process of first installing PostGIS and then installing the data server. For those that would like to learn a lot more about PostGIS, there’s a recently released book named “PostGIS in Action“. Although I haven’t seen it myself, I’ve read many good things about it online.

One last note. If you’re a Windows Vista+ user, the data sever will NOT install unless you escalate a DOS window to “Administrator”. To do this, do the following:

1) In the start menu, type “CMD”

2) Right click on the result at the top and select “Run as administrator”