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 triggers to populate the geometry column


In this recipe, we imagine that we have ever increasing data in our database, which needs spatial representation; however, in this case we want a hardcoded geometry column to be updated each time an insertion happens on the database, converting our x and y values to geometry as and when they are inserted into the database.

The advantage of this approach is that the geometry is then registered in the geometry_columns view, and therefore this approach works reliably with more PostGIS client types than creating a new geospatial view. This also provides the advantage of allowing for a spatial index that can significantly speed up a variety of queries.

Getting ready

We will start by creating another table of random points with x, y, and z values, as shown in the following query:

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS chp02.xwhyzed1 CASCADE; 
CREATE TABLE chp02.xwhyzed1 
( 
  x numeric, 
  y numeric, 
  z numeric 
) 
WITH (OIDS=FALSE); 
ALTER TABLE chp02.xwhyzed1 OWNER...