PostgreSQL Postal Address Normalizer

Motivation

Libpostal is a C library for parsing/normalizing street addresses around the world. Having that functionality directly in PostgreSQL could potentially be useful.

This extension is for that.

Usage Notes

• PostgreSQL 9.4 and higher is required because of the JSONB support. Could reduce that by using ordinary JSON as a return type instead.
• libpostal takes quite a lot of memory when intialized, and has a noticeable start-up time. When you first run postal_normalize or postal_parse there will be a delay while the library data first loads.
• Backends with libpostal active will be quite large in terms of memory usage (about 1Gb on my computer) so you probably want to take care about spawning too many of them at once.

Examples

=# SELECT unnest(postal_normalize('412 first ave, victoria, bc'));

                  unnest                  
------------------------------------------
 412 1st avenue victoria british columbia
 412 1st avenue victoria bc
(2 rows)


=# SELECT postal_parse('412 first ave, victoria, bc');

                                  postal_parse                                   
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 {"city": "victoria", "road": "first ave", "state": "bc", "house_number": "412"}
(1 row)

Functions

• postal_normalize(address TEXT) returns TEXT[]
• postal_parse(address TEXT) returns JSONB

Installation

UNIX

If you have PostgreSQL devel packages and CURL devel packages installed, you should have pg_config on your path. Confirm by running which pg_config.

Edit the paths to POSTAL_INCLUDE and POSTAL_LIBS in the Makefile to refer to your libpostal install location, and then run:

make
make install

Then in your database CREATE EXTENSION postal.

Windows

Sorry, no story here yet.

To Do

• Perhaps allow normalization options other than the defaults.