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

Extending inheritance – table partitioning


Table partitioning is an approach specific to PostgreSQL that extends inheritance to model tables that typically do not vary from each other in the available fields, but where the child tables represent logical partitioning of the data based on a variety of factors, be it time, value ranges, classifications, or in our case, spatial relationships. The advantages of partitioning include improved query performance due to smaller indexes and targeted scans of data, bulk loads, and deletes that bypass the costs of vacuuming. It can thus be used to put commonly used data on faster and more expensive storage, and the remaining data on slower and cheaper storage. In combination with PostGIS, we get the novel power of spatial partitioning, which is a really powerful feature for large datasets.

Getting ready

We could use many examples of large datasets that could benefit from partitioning. In our case, we will use a contour dataset. Contours are useful ways...