My First Spatial Database
Thanks to Schuyler and Rich Gibson, I now have a spatially aware postgres database.
Later today, thanks to Schuyler and zool, I’ll have a copy of Mapping Hacks, and a bluetooth GPS.
Last night, I learned how to use centroid(), astext(), and distance_spheroid(), and calculated the distance from my house to zool’s house, and from there to Darwin’s, where I ate lunch and used the wireless yesterday. I loaded some data, learned the frustration of having data in different projections, and learned a little bit about the various types of geometry. I loaded data from an ESRI shapefile. I found that “” in Postgres is equivilant to “ in mysql — that is, “GEOMETRY” means ‘the value from column Geometry’, not ‘GEOMETRY’, which is the literal. (If you ever get “Error: column “Foo” does not exist, that might be a good thing to check.)
Last night, I made my first foray into spatial databases.
Last night, I took control of space on my machine.
Tomorrow, I take control of space in the world!
But today, I need to work on things that I’m actually paid for at the moment. 😉