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

Geocoding with geopy and PL/Python


In this recipe, you will geocode addresses using web geocoding APIs, such as Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, Geocoder, GeoNames, and so on. Be sure to read the terms of service of these APIs carefully before using them in production.

The geopy Python library (https://github.com/geopy/geopy) offers convenient uniform access to all of these web services. Therefore, you will use it to create a PL/Python PostgreSQL function that can be used in your SQL commands to query all of these engines.

Getting ready

  1. Install geopy globally. (You cannot use a virtual environment in this case, as the user running the PostgreSQL service needs to access it on its Python path.)

In a Debian/Ubuntu box, it is as easy as typing the following:

$ sudo pip install geopy

In Windows, you can use the following command:

> pip install geopy
  1. If you still have not used PL/Python, verify whether your PostgreSQL server installation supports it. The Windows EDB installer should already include support...