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 an index. Before we get …
Tip of the Day – Ensure you have a Unique Identifier for each table in your database
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 or limitation due to a …
Tip of the Day: Consult subject matter experts before removing existing attributes
It begins Welcome to the first “Tip of the Day” on Get Spatial. This series will be used to capture particular events that stick out at me during the course of a workday. These tips could range from map design to database development, or data conversion to business practices. Each tip will be presented and then followed with more detailed …
GIS for Small Cities – Step 1: Evaluating your Organization
Know what you have, to know what you need The first step in setting up a GIS in any organization, large or small, is to figure out your needs. In order to figure out your needs, you need to look at what you have. This exercise is going to walk you through the different parts of your city, to see …
Esri 2014 – Recap
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? Fortunately, while at a networking …
CalGIS 2014 – Reflections on past and future
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 of URISA (CentralCalURISA), Bay Area …
GIS User Interfaces – Should we bother improving them?
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 a niche that a few …
GIS Enabled Database Part 2 – PostgreSQL
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 to be obtaining the software. …
GIS Enabled Database Part 1 – MySQL
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 post in this series will …
The Command Line – What’s the Use?
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, why they would want to …