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

Adding PostGIS layers – QGIS


In this recipe, we will establish a connection to our PostGIS database in order to add a table as a layer in QGIS (formerly known as Quantum GIS). Viewing tables as layers is great for creating maps or simply working on a copy of the database outside the database.

Please navigate to the following site to install the latest version LTR of QGIS (2.18 – Las Palmas at the time of writing):

http://qgis.org/en/site/

On this page, click on Download Now and you will be able to choose a suitable operating system and the relevant settings. QGIS is available for Android, Linux, macOS X, and Windows. You might also be inclined to click on Discover QGIS to get an overview of basic information about the program along with features, screenshots, and case studies.

Getting ready

To begin, create the schema for this chapter as chp11; then, download data from the U.S. Census Bureau's FTP site:

http://ftp2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2012/EDGES/tl_2012_39035_edges.zip

The shapefile is All...