Today’s Tip Keep focus on data by attending to details of border and map layout. Discussion Today’s tip comes out of an experience I had with our city manager. He stopped by to ask me to create a map for him, then asked if he could stick around and watch me while I did. Once …
Today’s Tip Define and stick with logical directory structure for file-based data Discussion In every mapping related job I’ve worked, one issue that always arises is data management. Unless you have a spatial database implemented already, the likelihood is that the majority of your data is in some file-based format. Heck, even if you have …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
