Paul Ramsey
blog.cleverelephant.ca · Personal blog · on HN since 2011
Paul Ramsey, co-creator of PostGIS, writes about spatial databases, Postgres internals, open source sustainability and the GIS industry.
What HN saysHN commenters recommend it as excellent GIS material, citing his critique of Esri and posts on Postgres indexing and parallel queries.
25HN people shared it
6linked it in comments
21stories submitted
347story points
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Most-shared posts
- 1PostGIS at 20, the Beginning2 people · 305 points · first shared 2021 · 32 comments on HN
- 2Learning Postgres Internals2 people · 7 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 3ST_Subdivide All the Things (2019)2 people · 2 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 4Esri and Winning2 people · 2 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 5Open Source Gets Old(er) – (Paul Ramsey Keynote FOSS4G NA 2019)2 people · 1 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 6PostGIS Polygon Splitting1 people · 6 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 7(Who Will Be) America's Next Big Mapping Company?1 people · 4 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 8Thoughts about Mapbox GL JS moving to a NON-OS License1 people · 3 points · first shared 2020 · 1 comments on HN
- 9Developer Diary 2 on PostGIS, Performance, & Porting1 people · 3 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 10Open Source GIS Fights the Three-Horned Monster (2002)1 people · 2 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 11What You Need to Know1 people · 2 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 12Parallel PostGIS and PgSQL 121 people · 2 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 13Paul Ramsey: How I Make Jeff Richer1 people · 2 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 14NoNoSQL (2010)1 people · 2 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 15That's not a strategic plan1 people · 1 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
twelvechairs · 2021-04-05
A couple of excellent GIS related links I would recommend to anyone interested in this area.
Talks and writing by PostGIS co-creator Paul Ramsey (who is incredible): http://blog.cleverelephant.ca/writings
The mapscaping podcast - a lot of intros to the complex and overlapping worlds of GIS: https://mapscaping.com/blogs/the-mapscaping-podcast
Soupy · 2023-07-09
that's essentially the route that Mapbox went down and they've even invented an entire mbtiles file format that essentially is just a sqlite db for doing these kinds of queries on the server
it's the "status quo" approach today in the industry, but it has some downsides still especially for smaller builders (ie me):
1. i'd have to run a separate tile server to take in the tile requests and convert them to "sql" requests (or mbtile requests) under the hood, and I'm just not a fan of more moving parts
2. I'd have to take my 10+ TB (and growing) of geotiffs and process them all into mbtiles which is a huge compute and walltime cost
3. the resulting mbtiles end up being similar in size at best, but at worst far larger than the original geotiffs so it balloons up the hosting and egress costs in exchange for faster requests. this is a great compression optimization breakdown for geotiffs that dives into this if you're interested - https://blog.cleverelephant.ca/2015/02/geotiff-compression-for-dummies…
anyways, I'm sure ted has his own thoughts as well but this is at least what I've taken away from this space after diving into it with fresh eyes in the past few months
whoopdeepoo · 2023-02-10
ESRI is a scourge on the GIS industry. One of the creators of postgis can say it much better than I can.
https://blog.cleverelephant.ca/2018/11/esri-dominates.html
janpot · 2019-09-02
> A wildcard at the end can use a regular (btree) index.
depending on the locale your db is in, it might be a little less "regular". recently fell in that trap.
http://blog.cleverelephant.ca/2016/08/pgsql-text-pattern-ops.html
durkie · 2018-10-31
do you have to do much tuning to trigger parallel queries? i'm also trying to do this with PostGIS, and it looks like you kind of have to tweak costs and fiddle with things a fair amount to get parallel queries to trigger: http://blog.cleverelephant.ca/2018/09/parallel-postgis-3.html
jeffdavis · 2012-08-29
OSM uses postgres: http://blog.cleverelephant.ca/2009/04/openstreetmap-moves-to-postgresq…