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

Introduction


At a minimum, desktop GIS programs allow you to visualize data from a PostGIS database. This relationship gets more interesting with the ability to edit and manipulate data outside of the database and in a dynamic play environment.

Make a change, see a change! For this reason, visualizing the data stored in PostGIS is often critical for effective spatial database management—or at least as a now-and-again sanity check. This chapter will demonstrate both dynamic and static relationships between your database and desktop clients.

Regardless of your experience level or role in the geospatial community, you should find at least one of the four GIS programs serviceable as a potential intermediate staging environment between your PostGIS database and end product.

In this chapter, we will connect to PostGIS using the following desktop GIS programs: QGIS, OpenJUMP GIS, gvSIG, and uDig.

Once connected to PostGIS, extra emphasis will be placed on some of the more sophisticated functionalities...