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 …
The Esri conference is over for another year. I wanted to write something about it. It is almost a requirement to write a recap of a conference. At the same time, there are really enough of those, and who honestly wants to read another missive about what sessions, or parties, or workshops I went to? …
It has now been a couple of days since the end of the CalGIS conference for 2014. For those that do not know, CalGIS is the California GIS Conference. It is hosted every year by the four chapters of the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA): Northern California Chapter of URISA, Central California Chapter …
There is an ongoing debate about whether GIS has a future as a profession. The path to get here would be to go to school and get some sort of a degree or certificate in Geography or GIS, and then get a job specifically as a GIS professional. The alternative is that it is simply …
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 …
Finding open source GIS software is as simple as a Google Search. Of course, once you do that, sorting through the hundreds of returns to find something useful, is likely to be a challenge. If you look at the results for “open source GIS”, the first would seem likely. That site, however, hasn’t been updated …
This is the first post of the blog, so I suppose I should say what I think it is going to be about. Initially, I was going to begin writing a series of tutorials for using open source GIS products to mimic the functions of ESRI’s ArcGIS software suite. The more that I have started …
