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PostGIS at 20, the Beginning
- aidos 5y agoI always love these little snippets of the history of how these projects come about. When you use something as established as PostGIS these days it’s easy to forget those few individuals that planted the seeds from which it formed. It’s an absolutely wonderful project - hat tip to everyone who has made it was it is.
- wiredfool 5y ago```When Dave had a working prototype, we hooked it up to our little applet and the thing sang. It was wonderfully quick,``` This is the thing that I most love about programming. Given a little time, making something just fly that wasn't possible before.
- CA0DA 5y agoGreat historical background - thanks Paul!
- joppy 5y agoAgreed - what a great story!
- catillac 5y agoI recently had to start working with GIS data and also didn’t want to be bound to anything ESRI related. I picked up PostGIS (along with the SQLite one Spacialite) and it’s really a dream to use. This history bite is really cool!
- lukeqsee 5y agoMuch of the interesting work I've been able to do in the last five years is entirely due to the hard work put into PostGIS to make it an excellent open-source GIS platform. Kudos to all involved, and especially Paul for his work spearheading and maintaining it for so many years!
- billfruit 5y agoPostGIS is popular and fine, but is there a front end framework available designed to work with it, so that one can fully avoid the proprietary ESRI stack?
- wiredfool 5y agoQGIS or Geoserver, or GDAL for lower level stuff.
- _joel 5y agoThere's https://www.qgis.org/en/site/ https://www.qgis.org/en/site/ but when I've worked with web based projects we've used Django and made a custom UI for it. It depends on what type of data you want to display though, for us it was map data so we just used https://leafletjs.com/ https://leafletjs.com/
- ZeroCool2u 5y agoFor quick stuff at work our default is geopandas + Plotly.
- mistrial9 5y agothere are plural resources, not one winner-take-all right?
- murphy214 5y agoMapbox is the probably the best GL based mapping client but it is no longer free on the latest version. Although, its not designed to work with PostGIS explicitly you definitely can. (i.e. querying mvts, map tiles, through PostGIS) Leaflet as others have said is another good option, but is really made for old slipply map tiles. Most of the ESRI based web clients I think look and feel terrible IMO. Rendering just looks off. What features are you looking for in a mapping client?
- flurben 5y agoEsri's JavaScript API 3 has poor performance, but I've been very happy with version 4.
- mooneater 5y agoI migrated my LAMP stack app to postgres+postgis in 2005, and met with Refractions folks in Victoria for advice, I have nothing but glowing reviews and its only gotten better since. Now I need something like that but in N dimensions...
- benboughton1 5y agoI love PostGIS. I have used it in many projects. PostGIS raster is really interesting to me but the general sentiment is that it's a bit slow and only use it if you need to. It just seems so powerful to combine raster and vector with SQL. What would the alternative be for raster query vertical and horizontal combined with vector? GRASSGIS Timeseries tools look interesting but I've not tried those. Any other ideas?
- pramsey 5y agoI remain pretty leery of raster in the database, for the reasons you list, but the power of GDAL to reach out over networks for raster access makes me a little more excited about some raster/vector use cases. It's not a panacea, but it's something. https://blog.crunchydata.com/postgis-raster-and-crunchy-bridge https://blog.crunchydata.com/postgis-raster-and-crunchy-brid...
- benboughton1 5y agoI read that blog post. Such a good example. But there is even a comment in there warning about raster via database. I am going to try it out as well with some MODIS data. I wonder what needs to be done to make raster more performant in POSTGIS?
- benboughton1 5y agoI just realised you are the author, so thankyou!
- pramsey 5y agoThere's some work to be done to make all functions parallelizeable. After that it gets harder. For large scale raster analysis, moving the processing closer to the data becomes paramount. I feel like purpose-built raster processing will always be better. Maybe something with FDW or other client/service architecture, where the database sends off the request and the bulk processing happens close to the data. Also, the row-based model of SQL sort of breaks down against raster where the model expects much much larger objects and presenting the tiled-up model to users just adds complexity without getting back performance or flexibility in return.
- jokoon 5y agoI have to admit I was quite happy to use sqlite/spatialite and load actual map data into it, it was not easy but manageable. I'm really looking forward making explorable a 3D world and cities from GIS data, it seems like it's quite ambitious and there are people already doing it, but for gaming it would mean having a very large world and require less 3D artists.
- rubyn00bie 5y agoPostGIS is one of those tools (along with Postgres as a whole, Redis also comes to mind) that has been a fucking pleasure to use and depend on. It works, brilliantly, is performant and fairly (relative to complexity) easy to use. If it wasn't for PostGIS I'd have been so far up shit creek at one point, I'd have needed climbing gear to go back down. Big thanks to all the folks who have spent their time on it. You've created something truly fucking helpful <3
- angrygoat 5y agoIt has also taken a whole subfield, GIS, which was seen as difficult, expensive, and specialised, and made it possible to easily include geospatial functions in all sorts of projects.
- gerbler 5y agoThank you Paul! I co-built a small company on GeoDjango (Django + PostGIS) and it was a real pleasure to be able to have such a well-working piece of technology in a very fragmented and messy space. It's a real gem in the world of geospatial data.