Practical GIS

A PostGIS Overview

In the previous chapter, we got introduced to the various types of spatial databases. We created and filled a PostGIS database with vector and raster layers. After that, we learned about the PostgreSQL SQL syntax, and executed some basic queries to get results which were previously only possible with geoalgorithms in QGIS. With our current knowledge, we would be able to integrate PostGIS into our workflow, and create some spatial analysis and visualization tasks using QGIS only as a thin client. That means, PostGIS does the hard lifting, while we only visualize the results in QGIS. However, we are yet to explain how to create good spatial databases with the intent of creating a distributed working environment. In this chapter, ...