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

Using ST_Extrude to extrude building footprints


PostGIS 2.1 brought a lot of really cool additional functionality to PostGIS. Operations on PostGIS raster types are among the more important improvements that come with PostGIS 2.1. A quieter and equally potent game changer was the addition of the SFCGAL library as an optional extension to PostGIS. According to the website http://sfcgal.org/, SFCGAL is a C++ wrapper library around CGAL with the aim of supporting ISO 19107:2013 and OGC Simple Features Access 1.2 for 3D operations.

From a practical standpoint, what does this mean? It means that PostGIS is moving toward a fully functional 3D environment, from representation of the geometries themselves and the operations on those 3D geometries. More information is available at http://postgis.net/docs/reference.html#reference_sfcgal.

This and several other recipes will assume that you have a version of PostGIS installed with SFCGAL compiled and enabled. Doing so enables the following functions:

  • ST_Extrude...