The world of Geospatial is, like any other technology, going to have some inherent risk. Part of making a program stronger should be looking at those risks and planning strategies to mitigate them. This article covers risks and mitigations in three sections, Program, Technology, and Operational, then wraps up with a recap and final thoughts.
The 3rd part in the GIS for Small Cities series looks at data storage options from a number of different perspectives. How data is stored affects everything from how many people can access your data, to how, and in what forms, you can display or visualize your data.
Discussion Today’s tip came to me after I was trying to link some tables into my database, from another database. What I saw in that database looked something like this: ce410ap sf200xp jj310fe Repeat this for a couple of hundred tables. This structure, I feel, is a holdover from the old days of taking a …
During a recent weekly Twitter chat about GIS, a GIS industry colleague asked for some thoughts about selecting and planning an Asset Management System. That question sparked a discussion between Nathan Heazlewood and myself. What follows is an expansion on that discussion. This post looks at the reasons and requirements for implementing an Asset Management System; what software you might use, whether COTS or a custom system, and how to get started. Finally, we wrap it up with a discussion of the need to have buy in from your supporting departments, the need to work with subject matter experts to determine what assets are important, and lastly, the need to keep it simple. Only do as much as you need, with the knowledge that you can add more as you go along.
Today’s Tip Create indexes for all spatial and attribute tables Discussion Today’s tip arises as a result of setting up layers using a Foreign Data Wrapper in Postgres. The layers were initially loading quite slowly, and I realized that I had not added a UniqueID, which I mentioned in TOTD 002, or any sort of …
Today’s Tip Ensure that you have a unique identifier attribute for each table in your database Discussion This is another tip that arises from me doing a task, and realizing I forgot something critical. In this case, the task involved creating a table, trying to perform an operation on said table, and encountering an error …
This is the second in a series of posts that will look individually at a number of different database formats. I will discuss installing and basic configuration, as well as how to enable support of spatial data types in the database. This post will be on the open-source RDBMS, PostgreSQL. The first step is going …
The first step in putting together an open source suite of GIS software is to install some sort of storage medium for your spatial data. There are many options out there, ranging from the ESRI personal geodatabase, which uses a Microsoft Access database, to a fully relational database management system like PostGreSQL with PostGIS. Each …
The title of this post is in some ways rhetorical because to some people, this is their primary means of interaction with a computer. With the majority of people, though, I think a safe assumption is that the command line is something they have heard about, but don’t really understand where it is, or even, …
Update – April 2017 Many things have changed with QGIS over the last few years since this post was written. I thought it worth the time to revisit the topic and expand its scope. Please take a look at my new post: QGIS – Loading Data —————– One of the major differences between many COTS …
