Location - the universal foreign key. Past, present and future of spatial data in PostgreSQL Wednesday 09:45 New York
Twitter: @pwramsey Blog: cleverelephant.ca GitHub: pramsey LinkedIn: paul-ramsey Company website: crunchydata.com
I’m a Executive Geospatial Engineer at Crunchy Data, a resident of Victoria, British Columbia, and have a professional history as a GIS consultant and spatial software programmer.
As a core developer of the PostGIS project, I’ve been an observer and occasional participant in the PostgreSQL community for a long time. I’ve contributed some small patches to postgres_fdw, and built a few small extensions, like the “http” extension and “ogr_fdw” extension.
I have never been to an “EU” version of a PostgreSQL conference, so I’m looking forward to seeing what the audience is like and the hearing what the attendees have to say.
I will be talking about geospatial computing in general, how it is useful, and what kinds of problems people commonly solve with it. The power of combining data using geographical reasoning is something that people can understand pretty quickly with the right visual pictures, but without knowing it’s an option they don’t necessarily reach for the tools that are available. With PostGIS installed, PostgreSQL turns into an extremely powerful tool for geospatial analysis: all the power of custom GIS software exposed as standard SQL logic.
I hope that everyone, from managers to programmers will get a little something from my talk. It’s got broad information about capabilities that anyone can understand, and it’s got some examples of SQL for the hands-on practitioners.
The more SQL and PostgreSQL experience they have, the more of the talk they’ll understand, but there’s no reason that anyone with a little database knowledge can’t enjoy it.
More and better parallelism. PostGIS users increasingly use long-running analytical queries, and the more those can be farmed out to multiple processes, the better their experience will be. This is all part-and-parcel of PostGIS taking over workloads that used to be the domain of specialized GIS software.
It might sound a little self-referential, but Stephen Frost’s “Review of Patch Reviewing” is interesting to me, because I want to become more involved in the core PostgreSQL community, and patch review is a great gateway to understanding more about the core.