[postgis-users] Visualizing Attribute Data

[Lee Hachadoorian]

In April there was a discussion GIS clients used for working with
PostGIS, with a lot of support for OpenJump, QGIS, and uDig.

I'm curious to hear people's strategies for visualizing attribute
data.  I'm doing some spatial querying, but most of my GIS data is
stable.  I've got census tracts, they don't change, but I need to grab
different combinations of census data and calculated data.  Some ways
I can think of to do it include:

1) Views to link spatial data to attribute data. (I then add a row to
geometry_columns with the view name.)
2) Materialized view, creating a new table with the desired spatial
and attribute data.  Main worry is the materialized view getting out
of sync if I change the attribute data.
3) Export to shapefile.

Any opinions, strategies, ideas about the advantages or disadvantages
of these strategies?  I'm using ArcGIS with zigGIS, but also playing
around with QGIS and uDig, all of which can work with PostGIS layers
or shapefiles.

Thanks,
Lee Hachadoorian
PhD Student, Geography
Program in Earth & Environmental Sciences
CUNY Graduate Center