Why people care about PostGIS and Postgres with Paul Ramsey & Regina Obe | Path To Citus Con Ep07

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.
* 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: talkingpostgres.com
Guests Paul Ramsey and Regina Obe:
Paul Ramsey co-founded PostGIS in 2001, and has been developing and promoting open source geospatial software solutions ever since. He currently works as an Executive Engineer for Crunchy Data, supporting their many customers and continuing to improve PostGIS and other associated projects.
Regina Obe is a Project Steering Committee member of the PostGIS project. She is president of Paragon Corporation, a database consulting company in Boston, MA focused on PostGIS and PostgreSQL. She is a co-author of several books on the topics of PostGIS, PostgreSQL, pgRouting, and most recently “SQL In a Nutshell 4th edition”.
Co-hosted by Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia:
Claire Giordano is head of the Postgres and Citus open source community initiatives at Microsoft. Prior to the Microsoft acquisition of Citus Data, Claire 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.
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.
Chapters:
⏩ 00:00 Intro to PostGIS experts Paul & Regina
⏩ 02:40 How DO you pronounce PostGIS?
⏩ 04:32 What is a geospatial extension to Postgres?
⏩ 18:28 Unexpected use cases for PostGIS
⏩ 37:06 PostGIS’s origin story!
⏩ 46:56 LLMs, AI, and chatGPT
⏩ 52:54 How to get started learning PostGIS
⏩ 1:05:58 Regina and Paul’s FOSS4G NA talks
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Links mentioned in this episode, in the order they were covered:
🔹PostGIS: postgis.net/
🔹FOSS4G NA: foss4gna.org/
🔹Ushahidi www.ushahidi.com/
🔹Humanitarian Open Street Map: www.hotosm.org/
🔹OpenStreetMap: www.openstreetmap.org/
🔹pgRouting: pgrouting.org/
🔹Regina’s books: locatepress.com/book/pgr
🔹Regina’s book PostGIS In Action: www.manning.com/books/postgis...
🔹MobilityDB: github.com/MobilityDB/MobilityDB
🔹Blog: Analyzing GPS trajectories at scale with Postgres, PostGIS, MobilityDB, & Citus: techcommunity.microsoft.com/t...
🔹OSGeo: www.osgeo.org/
🔹Simon Willison’s presentation on "The weird world of LLMs": simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/3/...
🔹QGIS: qgis.org/en/site/
🔹QGIS “Gentle Introduction” documentation: docs.qgis.org/3.28/en/docs/ge...
🔹PostGIS Workshops: postgis.net/documentation/tra...
🔹Locate Press: locatepress.com/
🔹FedGeoDay 2023: www.fedgeo.us/about-2023
foss4gna.org/schedule.html#sc... - Regina and Paul’s talks
🔹FOSS4G Brazil, December 2024: www.osgeo.org/foundation-news...
🔹Paul 's keynote talk at PGConfEU in Lisbon in 2018, titled "Put some "where" in your WHERE clause": docs.google.com/presentation/...
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