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

Measuring distances


In this recipe, we will check out the PostGIS functions needed for distance measurements (ST_Distance and its variants) and find out how considering the earth's curvature makes a big difference when measuring distances between distant points.

Getting ready

You should import the shapefile representing the cities from the USA that we generated in a previous recipe (the PostGIS table named chp03.cities). In case you haven't done so, download that shapefile from the https://nationalmap.gov/ website at http://dds.cr.usgs.gov/pub/data/nationalatlas/citiesx020_nt00007.tar.gz (this archive is also included in the code bundle available with this book) and import it to PostGIS:

$ ogr2ogr -f PostgreSQL -s_srs EPSG:4269 -t_srs EPSG:4326 -lco GEOMETRY_NAME=the_geom -nln chp03.cities PG:"dbname='postgis_cookbook' user='me' password='mypassword'" citiesx020.shp

How to do it...

The steps you need to perform to complete this recipe are as follows:

  1. First, use the ST_Distance function to calculate...