Re: Help with storing spatial (map coordinates) data?

On Tue, 13 Jun 2006, John Tregea wrote:

> Hi Brent,
>
> I will look at postGIS today. I will try and keep the whole GIS
> functionality as a separate schema to avoid confusing myself, so a
> postGIS may be exactly what I am looking for.
>

Ummm... one caution:

The lovely side effect, apart from all the SQL functions to query &
analyse spatial data in Postgres, is that any table with a
properly created geometry attribute is automatically available as a GIS
layer in a GIS map window, using GIS applications like QGIS, mezoGIS, JUMP
& uDIG (even ArcInfo via the PostGIS SDE), or to a less well integrated
extent, GRASS. It can also be a layer in a web map server application
using something like UMN mapserver.

However, not all of these support the concept of schema's, so only tables
in the public schema may be able to be plotted/mapped.

Also, from a data modelling perspective, a geometry attribute is not
inherently different to a numeric, int, varchar or text attribute, so
unless there is some other reason to divide entities with geometries into
a separate schema frpom those without, I'm not sure it is good practice.

Cheers,

Brent