[postgis-users] Who is Using PostGIS?

[Jeff Hoffmann]

On Mar 7, 2004, at 7:27 PM, Paul Ramsey wrote:

>    Who are you?

Jeff Hoffmann, developer for PropertyKey.  PropertyKey provides 
property information (including parcel maps and aerial/satellite ) to 
various real-estate related industries, both through the web and custom 
client software.

>    What are you using PostGIS for?

We're using it mostly for spatial queries joined with the textual 
property data.  We also use it with MapServer to generate maps on web 
pages.

>    Why did you choose PostGIS?

Have been using PostgreSQL for many years & started using PostGIS with 
0.7.1.  Before PostGIS came along, tried to do what we needed with the 
builtin geometry functions.  Integration with MapServer is important.  
We wrote our own "poor man's MapServer" that worked off of the builtin 
geometry functions but that didn't last long once we switched to 
PostGIS.  Integration with PROJ is really convenient, since most of our 
data comes in whatever local state plane system is for the county and 
we can leave it in whatever format it came in most of the time.

>    What makes you happy about your PostGIS installation?

It works.  Without going into a lot of detail, it has really 
streamlined a lot of what we're doing here.  Plus it's open source.  We 
committed to PostgreSQL a long time ago -- it was a good tool for what 
we were doing when we started & now it's a great tool.

>    What makes you unhappy about your PostGIS installation?

One little thing is that I tend to drop tables and then reload them by 
dumping the data from an updated shapefile pretty frequently & I don't 
like to call DropGeometryColumn because it has to go through and set 
the geometry column to null.  It seems unnecessary if I'm going to end 
up dropping the table anyway -- it's just a waste of a couple of 
minutes.   I can't call DropGeometryColumn after dropping the table 
because it gives me an error that the table doesn't exist.  Either I 
have to manually delete the entry from the geometry_columns or truncate 
the table, call DropGeometryColumn, then drop the table.  It seems to 
me that if you call DropGeometryColumn on a column that exists in 
geometry_columns but the table doesn't exist, it should delete that 
entry anyway instead of bailing out with an error.

--
Jeff Hoffmann
jeff at propertykey.com