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

Introduction


This chapter focuses on ways to structure data using the functionality provided by the combination of PostgreSQL and PostGIS. These will be useful approaches for structuring and cleaning up imported data, converting tabular data into spatial data on the fly when it is entered, and maintaining relationships between tables and datasets using functionality endemic to the powerful combination of PostgreSQL and PostGIS. There are three categories of techniques with which we will leverage these functionalities: automatic population and modification of data using views and triggers, object orientation using PostgreSQL table inheritance, and using PostGIS functions (stored procedures) to reconstruct and normalize problematic data.

Automatic population of data is where the chapter begins. By leveraging PostgreSQL views and triggers, we can create ad hoc and flexible solutions to create connections between and within the tables. By extension, and for more formal or structured cases, PostgreSQL...