PostGIS is one of those tools (along with Postgres as a whole, Redis also comes to mind) that has been a fucking pleasure to use and depend on. It works, brilliantly, is performant and fairly (relative to complexity) easy to use. If it wasn't for PostGIS I'd have been so far up shit creek at one point, I'd have needed climbing gear to go back down.<p>Big thanks to all the folks who have spent their time on it. You've created something truly fucking helpful <3
I always love these little snippets of the history of how these projects come about. When you use something as established as PostGIS these days it’s easy to forget those few individuals that planted the seeds from which it formed.<p>It’s an absolutely wonderful project - hat tip to everyone who has made it was it is.
Much of the interesting work I've been able to do in the last five years is entirely due to the hard work put into PostGIS to make it an <i>excellent</i> open-source GIS platform.<p>Kudos to all involved, and especially Paul for his work spearheading and maintaining it for so many years!
I recently had to start working with GIS data and also didn’t want to be bound to anything ESRI related. I picked up PostGIS (along with the SQLite one Spacialite) and it’s really a dream to use. This history bite is really cool!
I migrated my LAMP stack app to postgres+postgis in 2005, and met with Refractions folks in Victoria for advice, I have nothing but glowing reviews and its only gotten better since.<p>Now I need something like that but in N dimensions...
PostGIS is popular and fine, but is there a front end framework available designed to work with it, so that one can fully avoid the proprietary ESRI stack?
Thank you Paul!<p>I co-built a small company on GeoDjango (Django + PostGIS) and it was a real pleasure to be able to have such a well-working piece of technology in a very fragmented and messy space.<p>It's a real gem in the world of geospatial data.
I love PostGIS. I have used it in many projects.<p>PostGIS raster is really interesting to me but the general sentiment is that it's a bit slow and only use it if you need to. It just seems so powerful to combine raster and vector with SQL. What would the alternative be for raster query vertical and horizontal combined with vector? GRASSGIS Timeseries tools look interesting but I've not tried those. Any other ideas?
I have to admit I was quite happy to use sqlite/spatialite and load actual map data into it, it was not easy but manageable.<p>I'm really looking forward making explorable a 3D world and cities from GIS data, it seems like it's quite ambitious and there are people already doing it, but for gaming it would mean having a very large world and require less 3D artists.