Practical GIS

A brief overview of databases

Let's start with a very brief introduction of databases. You might have more than enough knowledge about databases; if that is the case, you can safely skip to spatial databases. First of all, what is a database? A database is a collection of structured or semi-structured data, which can be, at least, updated and queried by the Database Management System (DBMS) or the library using it. Besides its very trivial benefit of storing a lot of data in the same place, the wrapper system usually offers methods for not only retrieving but also aggregating, filtering, or joining data. Furthermore, most of the DBMS and libraries are very well-optimized for their use cases, and therefore, offer faster solutions than working ...