The PostGIS Installation instructions show using CREATE EXTENSION
to create PostGIS and several related extensions (see below).
After recently installing PostgreSQL 14.6 on Ubuntu,¹ I went to create these extensions. When I look at the available extensions, all of the extensions listed below except for fyzzystrmatch
appear as shown and as postgis-3
, postgis_raster-3
, etc. The available version numbers are the same for all of them, leading me to believe that they are just aliases, but I can't find any information about them in the documentation.
What are the postgis_*-3
extensions? Is there any difference between them and the "base" extensions, and is there a reason to prefer either one?
CREATE EXTENSION postgis;
CREATE EXTENSION postgis_raster;
CREATE EXTENSION postgis_sfcgal;
CREATE EXTENSION fuzzystrmatch; --needed for postgis_tiger_geocoder
--optional used by postgis_tiger_geocoder, or can be used standalone
CREATE EXTENSION address_standardizer;
CREATE EXTENSION address_standardizer_data_us;
CREATE EXTENSION postgis_tiger_geocoder;
CREATE EXTENSION postgis_topology;
¹ Actually done by a colleague.
"(postgis,3.1.2,t,f,,,"PostGIS geometry and geography spatial types and functions")"
*-3
lines that you see are probably referring to the module names in the filesystem. For example, my postgis_raster.control file has an entrymodule_pathname = '$libdir/postgis_raster-3'
, and in that directory I have a binary filepostgis_raster-3.dll
. I do not know why your Ubuntu system is listing those *-3 things. Do you have also corresponding .control files, for examplepostgis_raster-3.control
? In any case, there is no GIS component in this question really.