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

Performing simple map-algebra operations


In the previous recipe, we saw that the values in the PRISM rasters did not look correct for temperature values. After looking at the PRISM metadata, we learned that the values were scaled by 100.

In this recipe, we will process the scaled values to get the true values. Doing this will prevent future end-user confusion, which is always a good thing.

Getting ready

PostGIS provides two types of map-algebra functions, both of which return a new raster with one band. The type you use depends on the problem being solved and the number of raster bands involved.

The first map-algebra function (ST_MapAlgebra() or ST_MapAlgebraExpr()) depends on a valid, user-provided PostgreSQL algebraic expression that is called for every pixel. The expression can be as simple as an equation, or as complex as a logic-heavy SQL expression. If the map-algebra operation only requires at most two raster bands, and the expression is not complicated, you should have no problems using...