In this chapter, we looked at various techniques for using OGR, GDAL, Shapely, and pyproj within Python programs to solve a range of real-world problems. In doing so, we learned how to calculate the bounding box for a country, how to use Shapely to calculate the common border between two countries, how to analyze the contents of a DEM file, how to change projections and datums, how the buffer() function can be used to find points close to a polygon, how to use pyproj to calculate the length of a geometry, and how to calculate a point a given distance and bearing from a starting point.
Up to now, we have written programs that work directly with shapefiles and other data sources to load and then process geospatial data. In the next chapter, we will look at ways in which databases can be used to turbo-charge your geospatial development. Rather than having to read spatial data into memory one feature at a time, you can perform spatial queries directly in the database, allowing you to...