June 2017
Beginner
428 pages
10h 2m
English
Content preview from Practical GIS
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
Start your free trial
Spatial databases
What makes a database spatial? The answer shouldn't be searched for in the database but in the host DBMS. Spatial database management systems have some kind of spatial vision. They recognize spatial data and can offer some kind of dedicated functionality involving them. They have some exclusive validation methods for spatial data. Spatial functionality can be implemented at so many levels. Some of the spatial modules in DBMSs can only recognize points, lines, and polygons, while others offer full-scale GIS functionality even for raster data.
From the relational family, the two de facto standards in the open source segment are PostGIS and SpatiaLite. SpatiaLite is built upon SQLite, which is container-based, offering portable, ...