Ryan Lambert: Getting started with MobilityDB

The MobilityDB is an exciting project I have been watching for a while. The project's README explains that MobilityDB "adds support for temporal and spatio-temporal objects." The spatio-temporal part translates as PostGIS plus time which is very interesting stuff to me. I had briefly experimented with the project in its early days and found a lot of potential. Mobility DB 1.0 was released in April 2022, at the time of writing the 1.1.0 alpha release is available. This post explains how I got started with MobilityDB using PostGIS and pgRouting. I'm using OpenStreetMap roads data with pgRouting to generate trajectories. If you have gpx traces or other time-aware PostGIS data handy, those could be used in place of the routes I create with pgRouting. Install MobilityDB When I started working on this post a few weeks ago I had an unexpectedly difficult time trying to get MobilityDB working. I was trying to install from the production branch with Postgres 15 and Ubuntu 22.04 and ran into a series of errors. It turned out the fixes to allow MobilityDB to work with these latest versions had been in the develop branch for more than a year. After realizing what the problem was I asked a question and got an answer. The fixes are now in the master branch tagged as 1.1.0 alpha. Thank you to everyone involved with making that happen! To install MobilityDB I'm following the instructions to install from source. These steps involve git clone then using cmake, make, and sudo make install. Esteban Zimanyi explained they are working on getting packaging worked out for providing deb and yum installers. It looks like work is progressing on those! Update Configuration After installing the extension, the postgresql.conf needs to be updated to include PostGIS in the shared_preload_libraries and increase the max_locks_per_transaction to double the default value. shared_preload_libraries = 'postgis-3' max_locks_per_transaction = 128