GDAL is about to drop support for VS2013 and earlier, please vote

As you may have noticed from recent emails on the gdal-dev list, support for C++11 in VS 2013 is only partial and kind a bit of a pain to deal with.

The GDAL team created a poll to probe the community how much support for VS 2013 is seen as needed for GDAL 2.3

Please cast your vote (doesn't require any account, open to any user / developer / whatever party with at least some interest in GDAL ) at

http://www.easypolls.net/poll.html?p=5a399ccfe4b04ebe73ddb454

Voting opened until end of this week

Thanks

OGR MSSQL bulk insert support added in GDAL 2.1

With the release of GDAL 2.1.0 the new bulk insert support has been added to the OGR MSSQL Spatial driver. Using the bulk insert option the upload is approx. 20 times faster comparing to the earlier driver versions, which is especially useful when uploading large data tables to MSSQL server.

The bulk insert option involved the need to implement the write support for the native SqlGeometry/SqlGeography serialization formats, which in turn eliminates the need of the server side geometry conversions from WKB and WKT causing large amount of memory pressure at the server and may cause issues like this one.

The implemented bulk insert support requires the SQL Server Native Client 10+ driver to be installed on the system. This is installed along with a SQL server setup or available from a separate package provided by Microsoft. This requirement is a bit unpleasant for the binary distribution providers, because the driver should link against the corresponding sqlncli dll. Therefore we added support to build the MSSQL spatial driver as a plugin dll (ogr_MSSQLSpatial.dll). The gdal-core msi installers (development, daily) at GISInternals have been modified to include the bulk insert enabled MSSQL driver as an optional component (not installed by default). If you enable this component, make sure that the SQL Server Native Client 11 driver is also installed on your the system, otherwise ogr2ogr will likely fail to start.

By installing this driver, the bulk insert option is enabled by default when using MSSQLSpatial as an ogr2ogr target database, however we can disable bulk insert by using the MSSQLSPATIAL_USE_BCP=FALSE config option which turns the upload to a set of "INSERT INTO" operations as usual, but that option continues to use the native geometry/geography serialization formats. We could also select the earlier WKT/WKB upload by using the UPLOAD_GEOM_FORMAT layer creation option. For more information about the config and layer creation options supported by the driver please refer to the MSSQL Spatial driver information page.

The new GISIntenals site (providing Windows binary packages) is about to be released

GISInternals is an online system for creating daily built binary packages for the GDAL and MapServer projects. The anchestor of this system has been provided to be the Windows buildslaves for the osgeo buildbot in 2007. The build system in the current form (providing downloadable packages) has been set up in 2009. As of this time, the system has been continuously improved by adding more and more packages to make the life easier for the users and developers of these open source projects. During this time the number of the visitors and the amount of the downloads continues to grow, and the site has been visited from more than 160 countries around the world.

In 2014 December, I'm about to release a new version with several changes in the design and the architecture. The functionality has been divided into 3 portions: the GUI frontend, the file servers (php and asp.net backends) and the the build server. This approach will provide to increase the reliability and the availability of the site by the chance of using multiple build servers (upload agents) in the future.

If you would like to preview the upcoming version visit download.gisinternals.com.

There are several upcoming changes are planned to be released in December including support for the newer compiles and additions in the packages (like MapCache and the new GDAL drivers).

IntraMaps Roam first release - Windows QGIS Data Collection

Digital Mapping Solutions, and Nathan Woodrow, would like to announce the first version of IntraMaps Roam - a simple, but flexible, Windows based data collection application built using Python and QGIS.

IntraMaps Roam (or Roam for short) is a standalone, fully bundled, Python application that was created to do data collection with a QGIS backend. For those of you who have seen my QMap project Nathan started a year or so ago you can consider this a reincarnation of that project. Most of the code has been reworked and using the QGIS libs gave him full flexibility in layout.

The release page can be found at https://github.com/DMS-Aus/Roam/releases/tag/v2.0 and the wiki with all the information to get started at: https://github.com/DMS-Aus/Roam/wiki You can also take a look at the FAQ for the common questions: https://github.com/DMS-Aus/Roam/wiki/FAQ

Roam has been a great exercise in using and bundling QGIS libs with a Python application.

As Roam is based on PyQt and QGIS it is under the GPL2 license. Pull requests are welcome.

Links:

• https://github.com/DMS-Aus/Roam/releases/tag/v2.0
• https://github.com/DMS-Aus/Roam/wiki
• https://github.com/DMS-Aus/Roam/wiki/FAQ

Happy mapping!

Announcing MapServer MapManager 1.0

Digital Mapping Solutions along with Tamas Szekeres is pleased to announce the open source release of MapServer MapManager.
MapServer MapManager is an easy to use Windows desktop GUI application (based on the MapScript C# API and GDAL C# API) that allows you to easily create and configure great looking MapServer map files. The application provides a set of dialogues for setting the various properties in the map configuration and renders the map directly on the screen allowing panning and zooming of the displayed area by using the mouse. The MapManager user interface provides common operations for selecting the features and inspecting the attributes for setting up labelling and changing the style and symbology. The created map configuration can then be saved into a map file which can be used by various MapServer CGI/MapScript applications. Mapserver MapManager also allows users to save the map images in various output formats supported by MapServer.

MapServer MapManager is provided with GPLv3 license.
The build SDK from gisinternals can be used to compile MapManager. For more information about building MapManager please refer to the Readme file.
Windows installers are provided in the following download locations. Certain GDAL drivers are provided as separate installers due to their custom licensing terms. When installing the GDAL driver plugins you should select the MapManager install location as the target directory.
Installers based on the current MapServer release (6.4.1)
MapServer MapManager
GDAL ECW driver
GDAL FileGDB driver
GDAL MrSID driver
GDAL Oracle driver

Installers based on the current MapServer stable branch (6.4) (compiled daily)
MapServer MapManager
GDAL ECW driver
GDAL FileGDB driver
GDAL MrSID driver
GDAL Oracle driver

For more information about using MapManager please refer to the online help.

Mapserver daily builds has been added to osgeo4w

The build server at http://www.gisinternals.com/sdk/ has now been configured to provide daily built packages (x86 and x64) from the latest MapServer development and stable branches.

In addition to the mapserver core, the python and the java packages are also provided.

In the osgeo4w package selection page the following packages can be selected:

1. mapserver,mapserver-python,mapserver-java -> corresponds to the latest release (these packages are being built manually as soon as a new release is issued)
2. mapserver-dev,mapserver-python-dev,mapserver-java-dev -> corresponds to the latest master branch
3. mapserver-stable-dev,mapserver-python-stable-dev,mapserver-java-stable-dev -> corresponds to the latest stable branch

When using the -dev and -stable-dev packages You should re-run the osgeo4w installer regularly to be up to date with the recent builds

MapServer SVG symbol support

Windows builds at gisinternals are now provided with SVG symbol support in MapServer. For more information about this feature see this article SVG Symbol support in MapServer.