Book Image

Practical GIS

Book Image

Practical GIS

Overview of this book

The most commonly used GIS tools automate tasks that were historically done manually—compiling new maps by overlaying one on top of the other or physically cutting maps into pieces representing specific study areas, changing their projection, and getting meaningful results from the various layers by applying mathematical functions and operations. This book is an easy-to-follow guide to use the most matured open source GIS tools for these tasks. We’ll start by setting up the environment for the tools we use in the book. Then you will learn how to work with QGIS in order to generate useful spatial data. You will get to know the basics of queries, data management, and geoprocessing. After that, you will start to practice your knowledge on real-world examples. We will solve various types of geospatial analyses with various methods. We will start with basic GIS problems by imitating the work of an enthusiastic real estate agent, and continue with more advanced, but typical tasks by solving a decision problem. Finally, you will find out how to publish your data (and results) on the web. We will publish our data with QGIS Server and GeoServer, and create a basic web map with the API of the lightweight Leaflet web mapping library.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Preface
14
Appendix

Customizing the database


Most of the activities in this chapter will take place in the pgAdmin environment. We will learn how to utilize the convenient functionality it offers to create a nice, well-structured database without thinking of long commands. Of course, GUI operations cannot be automated, and using the CLI is generally faster (if we know exactly how to use it); therefore, we will also see those commands, as pgAdmin actually builds them from the options we include, and lets us see the result. First of all, let's see what pgAdmin has to show us if we open our database:

Note

Don't worry if you use pgAdmin 4--it has more items to show. However, the ones we will use are present in both versions.

As shown in the preceding screenshot, we can see the hierarchical structure of PostgreSQL having extensions, schemas which contain tables and functions, and roles.

Securing our database

So far, we used the public schema with the postgres role to create and fill our database. These are the default...