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Comment by justinvh | Hacker News Reader

> Its geospatial capabilities put it as the most advanced geospatial database, only ESRI software really stands to beat it here

Where does PostGIS stand in comparison?

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Likely the OP means PostGIS where they say Postgres. PostGIS is the set of geospatial extensions for Postgres.

Correct, my intention was fully PostGIS == Postgres geospatial.

The original comment was about how few packages and how little space Postgres takes. PostGIS is good but it pulls in a lot of extra packages.

I hate Oracle as much as anyone but this is no longer a fair comparison. If you’re bragging about how good PostGIS is, you’re no longer anywhere near a 66MB install. More like (IIRC) 5 to 10 times that.

But even assuming the high end of your estimate, Postgres + PostGIS would still be less than 1/10 of the size of a baseline Oracle installation.

660 mb disk space?

I can afford that.

And I think that most people can.

For the record, on Debian unstable:

  root@pg1:~# LANG=C apt install postgresql-12 
  Reading package lists... Done
  [...]
  0 upgraded, 32 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
  Need to get 59.7 MB of archives.
  After this operation, 240 MB of additional disk space will be used.
  Do you want to continue? [Y/n] ^C
  root@pg1:~# LANG=C apt install postgresql-12 postgresql-12-postgis-3
  Reading package lists... Done
  [...]
  0 upgraded, 105 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
  Need to get 104 MB of archives.
  After this operation, 418 MB of additional disk space will be used.
  Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

I think the addition of LLVM for JIT execution of plans added a lot to the Postgres install baseline (at least in distribution packages, you can compile a much leaner postgres yourself).

Due to the way that the LLVM dependency in postgres works, it could be packaged separately from the base postgres server package. The LLVM interfacing code is runtime loaded, and there's no error if "llvmjit.so" is not on the system, even when the server was built with LLVM support. It's basically a packager's choice whether to do so, or not.

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