Book Image

PostGIS Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Pedro Wightman, Bborie Park, Stephen Vincent Mather, Thomas Kraft, Mayra Zurbarán
Book Image

PostGIS Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Pedro Wightman, Bborie Park, Stephen Vincent Mather, Thomas Kraft, Mayra Zurbarán

Overview of this book

PostGIS is a spatial database that integrates the advanced storage and analysis of vector and raster data, and is remarkably flexible and powerful. PostGIS provides support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL object-relational database and is currently the most popular open source spatial databases. If you want to explore the complete range of PostGIS techniques and expose related extensions, then this book is for you. This book is a comprehensive guide to PostGIS tools and concepts which are required to manage, manipulate, and analyze spatial data in PostGIS. It covers key spatial data manipulation tasks, explaining not only how each task is performed, but also why. It provides practical guidance allowing you to safely take advantage of the advanced technology in PostGIS in order to simplify your spatial database administration tasks. Furthermore, you will learn to take advantage of basic and advanced vector, raster, and routing approaches along with the concepts of data maintenance, optimization, and performance, and will help you to integrate these into a large ecosystem of desktop and web tools. By the end, you will be armed with all the tools and instructions you need to both manage the spatial database system and make better decisions as your project's requirements evolve.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Optimizing SQL queries


When an SQL query is received, PostgreSQL runs the query through its planner to decide the best execution plan. The best execution plan generally results in the fastest query performance. Though the planner usually makes the correct choices, on occasion, a specific query will have a suboptimal execution plan.

For these situations, the following are several things that can be done to change the behavior of the PostgreSQL planner:

  • Add appropriate column indices to the tables in question
  • Update the statistics of the database tables
  • Rewrite the SQL query by evaluating the query's execution plan and using capabilities available in your PostgreSQL installation
  • Consider changing or adding the layout of the database tables
  • Change the query planner's configuration

Adding indices (the first bullet point) is discussed in a separate recipe found in this chapter. Updating statistics (the second point) is generally done automatically by PostgreSQL after a certain amount of table activity...