Why people care about PostGIS and Postgres with Paul Ramsey & Regina Obe
The geospatial world of Postgres is so much more than mapping. Paul Ramsey and Regina Obe join Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia to explore the "where" on Path To Citus Con*, the podcast for developers who love Postgres. What are some of the unexpected use cases for PostGIS, one of the most popular extensions to Postgres? How have Large Language Models helped in the geospatial world? Can you really model almost anything with pgRouting? “Where” is the universal foreign key. They talk about communities and governments using geospatial data and how it's very difficult to build a database that does not have some sort of spatial component to it. Why do people care about PostGIS? Find out more about OpenStreetMap and its place in the open source geospatial world. Finally, Paul and Regina share the origin story for the PostGIS extension to Postgres.
*[Update: July 2024] Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the past podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con—now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano—can be found here: https://talkingpostgres.com
Links mentioned in this episode, in the order they were covered:
*[Update: July 2024] Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the past podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con—now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano—can be found here: https://talkingpostgres.com
Links mentioned in this episode, in the order they were covered:
- PostGIS: https://postgis.net/
- FOSS4G NA: https://foss4gna.org/
- Ushahidi: https://www.ushahidi.com/
- Humanitarian Open Street Map: https://www.hotosm.org/
- OpenStreetMap: https://www.openstreetmap.org/
- pgRouting: https://pgrouting.org/
- Regina Obe’s books: https://locatepress.com/book/pgr
- Regina’s book “PostGIS In Action”: https://www.manning.com/books/postgis-in-action-third-edition?experiment=B
- MobilityDB: https://github.com/MobilityDB/MobilityDB
- Blog: Analyzing GPS trajectories at scale with Postgres, PostGIS, MobilityDB, & Citus: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-database-for-postgresql/analyzing-gps-trajectories-at-scale-with-postgres-mobilitydb-amp/ba-p/1859278
- OSGeo: https://www.osgeo.org/
- Simon Willison’s presentation on "The weird world of LLMs": https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/3/weird-world-of-llms/
- QGIS: https://qgis.org/en/site/
- QGIS “Gentle Introduction” documentation: https://docs.qgis.org/3.28/en/docs/gentle_gis_introduction/
- PostGIS Workshops: https://postgis.net/documentation/training/#workshop
- Locate Press: https://locatepress.com/
- FedGeoDay 2023: https://www.fedgeo.us/about-2023
- Schedule of FOSS4G NA 2023: https://foss4gna.org/schedule.html#schedule
- FOSS4G Brazil, December 2024: https://www.osgeo.org/foundation-news/foss4g-2024-has-been-awarded-to-belem-brazil/
- Paul's keynote talk at PGConfEU in Lisbon in 2018, titled "Put some "where" in your WHERE clause": https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1xyXA4-0wmNX7WfiLeH9h10bIkZxrej278-mMaClagys/edit?usp=sharing
Creators and Guests
Host
Claire Giordano
Claire Giordano is head of the Postgres open source community initiatives at Microsoft. Claire has served in leadership roles in engineering, product management, and product marketing at Sun Microsystems, Amazon/A9, and Citus Data. At Sun, Claire managed the engineering team that created Solaris Zones, and led the effort to open source Solaris.
Host
Pino de Candia
Pino de Candia is a software dev manager at Microsoft since 2020 and is currently working on the Citus open source project. Pino previously worked on the managed PostgreSQL database service in Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL, which includes Citus on Azure support for distributed PostgreSQL. Pino has lived in New Orleans since 2017.
Producer
Aaron Wislang
Open Source Engineering + Developer Relations at @Microsoft + @Azure ☁️ | @golang k8s 🐧 🐍 🦀 ☕ 🍷📷 🎹🇨🇦 | 😷 💉++ (inc. bivalent) | @aaronw.dev (on 🟦sky)
Producer
Carol Smith
Senior Program Manager at Microsoft in the Citus Community team. Previously at GitHub and Google. Horseback rider, cook, and armchair movie critic.
