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

Organizing the database


One of the most important things to consider when creating and using a database is how to organize the data. The layout should be decided when you first establish the database. The layout can be decided on or changed at a later date, but this is almost guaranteed to be a tedious, if not difficult, task. If it is never decided on, a database will become disorganized over time and introduce significant hurdles when upgrading components or running backups.

By default, a new PostgreSQL database has only one schema - namely, public. Most users place all the data (their own and third-party modules, such as PostGIS) in the public schema. Doing so mixes different information from various origins. An easy method with which to separate the information is by using schemas. This enables us to use one schema for our data and a separate schema for everything else.

Getting ready

In this recipe, we will create a database and install PostGIS in its own schema. We will also load some...