Introducing Crunchy Data Warehouse: A next-generation Postgres-native data warehouse. Crunchy Data Warehouse Learn more

Posts about Spatial

  • 10 min read

    Using Cloud Rasters with PostGIS

    Paul Ramsey

    With the extension, it is possible to access gigabytes of raster data from the cloud, without ever downloading the data . How? The venerable extension (released 13 years ago ) already has the critical core support built-in! Rasters can be stored inside the database, or outside the database, on a local file system or anywhere it can be accessed by the underlying GDAL raster support library. The storage options include S3, Azure, Google, Alibaba, and any HTTP server that supports RANG...

    Read More
  • Running an Async Web Query Queue with Procedures and pg_cron

    Paul Ramsey

    The number of cool things you can do with the http extension is large, but putting those things into production raises an important problem. The amount of time an HTTP request takes, 100s of milliseconds, is 10- to 20-times longer that the amount of time a normal database query takes. This means that potentially an HTTP call could jam up a query for a long time. I recently ran an HTTP function in an update against a relatively small 1000 record table. The query took 5 minutes to run, and durin...

    Read More
  • 9 min read

    Name Collision of the Year: Vector

    Elizabeth Christensen

    I can’t get through a zoom call, a conference talk, or an afternoon scroll through LinkedIn without hearing about vectors. Do you feel like the term vector is everywhere this year? It is. Vector actually means several different things and it's confusing. Vector means AI data, GIS locations, digital graphics, and a type of query optimization, and more. The terms and uses are related, sure. They all stem from the same original concept. However their practical applications are quite different. So...

    Read More
  • 8 min read

    PostGIS Day 2024 Summary

    Paul Ramsey

    In late November, on the day after GIS Day, we hosted the annual PostGIS day online event. 22 speakers from around the world, in an agenda that ran from mid-afternoon in Europe to mid-afternoon on the Pacific coast. We had an amazing collection of speakers, exploring all aspects of PostGIS, from highly technical specifics, to big picture culture and history. A full playlist of PostGIS Day 2024 is available on the Crunchy Data YouTube channel . Here’s a highlight reel of the talks and themes t...

    Read More
  • Loading the World! OpenStreetMap Import In Under 4 Hours

    Greg Smith

    The OpenStreetMap (OSM) database builds almost 750GB of location data from a single file download. OSM notoriously takes a full day to run. A fresh open street map load involves both a massive write process and large index builds. It is a great performance stress-test bulk load for any Postgres system. I use it to stress the latest PostgreSQL versions and state-of-the-art hardware. The stress test validates new tuning tricks and identifies performance regressions. Two years ago, I presented (...

    Read More
  • 14 min read

    Vehicle Routing with PostGIS and Overture Data

    Paul Ramsey

    The Overture Maps collection of data is enormous, encompassing over 300 million transportation segments , 2.3 billion building footprints , 53 million points of interest , and a rich collection of cartographic features as well. It is a consistent global data set, but it is intimidatingly large -- what can a person do with such a thing? Building cartographic products is the obvious thing, but what about the less obvious. With an analytical engine like PostgreSQL and Crunchy Bridge for Analy...

    Read More
  • PostGIS meets DuckDB: Crunchy Bridge for Analytics goes Spatial

    Marco Slot

    Crunchy Data is excited to announce the next major feature release for Crunchy Bridge for Analytics : Geospatial Analytics . We have developed a variety of features to connect Postgres and PostGIS to S3 and public web servers to make spatial data access easier than ever. This release includes: • Creating an analytics table directly from a geospatial data set by providing only the URL, for ad-hoc queries and data transformations. • Creating a regular PostGIS table directly from a URL. • Automat...

    Read More
  • 3 min read

    Converting DMS to PostGIS Point Geometry

    Elizabeth Christensen

    I love taking random spatial data and turning it into maps. Any location data can be put into PostGIS in a matter of minutes. Often when I’m working with data that humans collected, like historic locations or things that have not yet traditionally been done with computational data, I’ll find traditional Degrees, Minutes, Seconds (DMS) data. To get this into PostGIS and QGIS, you’ll need to convert this data to a different system for decimal degrees. There’s probably proprietary tools that will d...

    Read More
  • 5 min read

    Inside PostGIS: Calculating Distance

    Paul Ramsey

    Calculating distance is a core feature of a spatial database, and the central function in many analytical queries. • "How many houses are within the evacuation radius?" • "Which responder is closest to the call?" • "How many more miles until the school bus needs routine maintenance?" "How many houses are within the evacuation radius?" "Which responder is closest to the call?" "How many more miles until the school bus needs routine maintenance?" PostGIS and any other spatial database let you answ...

    Read More
  • 6 min read

    Connecting QGIS to Postgres and PostGIS

    Elizabeth Christensen

    QGIS, the Quantum Geographic Information System, is an open-source graphical user interface for map making. QGIS works with a wide variety of file types and has robust support for integrating with Postgres and PostGIS. Today I just wanted to step through getting QGIS connected to a Postgres database and the basic operations that let you connect the two systems. Connecting QGIS to Postgres is very similar to any other GUI or application, you’ll need the database host, login, and password details....

    Read More