[postgis-users] Promoting PostgreSQL and PostGIS to wider business intelligence community

Basques, Bob (CI-StPaul) bob.basques at ci.stpaul.mn.us
Fri Sep 25 08:47:42 PDT 2020


All,

I almost jumped over this thread from the beginning because I wasn’t understanding the original question very well, mostly based on my own labels for these types of services/datasets.  I reference things like this as “derived” data.  The actual source data doesn’t exist (unless it gets cached for performance reasons) but rather it a data blending via a SQL call.

I agree with other comments here too, related to this type of product usually being the sort of thing that can’t be easily done by most GIS apps out of the box.  Also provides for a pipelining of processes of sorts for sudo processing on the fly.

I’ve got a few different examples of this, some fairly simple, some very complicated that are treated as datasets by the end users, because the SQL is embed into a config, like a Mapserver Mapfile for example.  More and more of our datasets are being created in this fashion vs historically sourcing a “real” dataset directly.

In general the end users are starting to think and expect this type of analysis approach to the data, especially related to time indexing and looking at data over time.  Consequently, this is pushing me (us) to start thinking about time indexing of data and how to store datasets accordingly.

Bobb



From: postgis-users <postgis-users-bounces at lists.osgeo.org> on behalf of Shaozhong SHI <shishaozhong at gmail.com>
Reply-To: PostGIS Discussion <postgis-users at lists.osgeo.org>
Date: Friday, September 25, 2020 at 3:11 AM
To: PostGIS Discussion <postgis-users at lists.osgeo.org>
Subject: Re: [postgis-users] Promoting PostgreSQL and PostGIS to wider business intelligence community

Think Before You Click: This email originated outside our organization.

All very interesting and useful points!

I am also thinking about data blending and new data production on the data service platform for supporting the wider Business Intelligence community.

Surely, we need excellent examples to show them that we make data ready for their consumption, and are here to help them.

Regards,

Shao

On Fri, 25 Sep 2020 at 08:37, Andreas Neumann <a.neumann at carto.net<mailto:a.neumann at carto.net>> wrote:

Hi,

In our GIS team (small team of 10, local government, province level) we use a lot of SQL in collaboration with Gradle/GRETL and Jenkins for our automated data flows and statistics. It is amazing how much analysis and data aggregation you can do with SQL only - without having to touch QGIS or ArcGIS or any other so called "business intelligence" tools (that are often quite expensive).

Every new employee that wants to join our team has to have SQL knowledge - that's a prerequisite - or they wouldn't get the job. Most of our employees are not programmers though.

I also teach PostgreSQL/Postgis training courses (2-3 days usually) - a lot of the participants are not programmers but still manage to do analysis with SQL. Typical course participants are scientists, people working at engineering companies or government.

So - I do think there is a significant number of people who use SQL, but aren't programmers.

Andreas

On 2020-09-25 00:09, ruvenml at beamerbrooks.com<mailto:ruvenml at beamerbrooks.com> wrote:
I doubt whether PostGIS has any direct value whatsoever for desktop application users.  At a very minimum,  using PostGIS directly requires a  knowledge of SQL.  In fact, the more knowledge of SQL a user has, the more powerful PostGIS will be.   SQL is usually taught in a database course which, in many computer science curriculums, is taught in the second or third year, not to end users in another occupation.

Business intelligence systems such as Power BI and Tableau can connect directly to PostGIS data bases and provide end user commands and operations for querying and modifying those databases.  GIS systems such as ArcGIS and QGIS provide similar capabilities.   End users can get nearly all of the power of PostGIS without having to learn anything outside of the business intelligence system or the GIS system.

PostGIS is probably best reserved for people who have a programming background and whose jobs or avocations involve doing things that are difficult or impossible to do in existing business intelligence or GIS applications.  There seem to be more than enough people like that to keep the PostGIS developers quite busy.

Ruven Brooks







On 9/24/2020 3:58 PM, Shaozhong SHI wrote:
Though we have got some good examples of serving data to wider business intelligence community, we are still interested in finding excellent, compelling examples for showing the value of PostgreSQL/PostGIS as a data service to desktop application users.

I just wonder whether there are excellent examples, for general users to appreciate?



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