PostGIS
Spatial and Geographic objects for PostgreSQL
Upcoming Events
FOSS4G NA 2019
April 16th-18th 2019 San Diego, CA, USA
FOSS4G 2019
August 26th-30th 2019 Bucharest, Romania
Recent past events
Oct 23rd-26th 2018 Lisbon, Portugal
Tips
Move PostGIS extension to a different schema
As of PostGIS 2.3, the postgis extension was changed to no longer allow relocation. All function calls within the extension are now schema qualified.
While this change fixed some issues with database restore, it created the issue of if you installed PostGIS in a schema other than the one you wanted to it is not intuitive how to move it to a different schema. Luckily there is a way to do this.
For this exercise, I will install PostGIS in the default schema and then demonstrate how to move it into another schema location.
You can run these steps using psql or pgAdmin or any other PostgreSQL tool you want.
Case Studies
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
As a software engineer at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, I work on a collaborative neuron reconstruction and analysis software called CATMAID 1 (screenshot: 3), which is used for neuroscience research. We use PostGIS to represent neurons in a 3D space.
They consist of 3D points that reference their parent nodes or are the root [=soma of neuron] if they have no parent). Together with synapses, point clouds and TIN meshes for modeling compartments in a dataset, they model the spatial aspects of our neuroscience world. Users create those neuron reconstructions manually in a collaborative fashion plus segmentation programs can be used as additional data source. Using its spatial indices, PostGIS helps us to quickly query neurons in a particular field of view. The space of a single project contains sometimes 100s of millions of interconnected individual points. We also do bounding box intersection queries between neurons and compartment meshes, which then refine in the front-end by doing more precise intersection tests.
This software is used by quite a few research labs and as far as I know they all do their own hosting with a dedicated server and this is what we do as well. The reason being mainly that wth larger datasets, we benefit from machines with a lot of RAM (>256G), fast SSD/NVMe drives and many CPUs as well as fast local data access for e.g. image data.
Thanks so much for making PostGIS work well in non-GIS contexts too—-it makes my life much easier!
Vanguard Appraisals
Vanguard Appraisals is new to the GIS world. In fact, we aren’t really in the GIS world; we just kind of brush up against it. We do mass property appraisal for entire county and city jurisdictions, and we develop software to collect, price and maintain values. We also host assessment data online so that homeowners can search and find property information much simpler from the comfort of their own home. Our software and websites are used in 7 states (IA, IL, MN, MO, NE, ND, SD).