I want to be a very spatial snowflake

March 9, 2010 7:04 AM

I'm trying to learn the fundamentals of GIS query concepts. Most books and tutorials are all about pretty maps. I would rather understand the SQL. Resources, advice, forums all appreciated.

Mostly for my own interest, but the skills are also useful for constraint mapping at work. I'm currently working with quite a limited toolset of SpatiaLite and QGIS. For data, I have the toronto.ca | Open city shapefiles.

I have basic SQL skills half-remembered from my analyst programmer years. I'm getting stuck on why simple queries such as finding road intersections seem to go off into hyperspace.

posted by scruss to computers & internet (2 answers total)

PostGIS's documentation will provide you an excellent tutelage in basic concepts of standard spatial SQL. It can easily be installed on windows and connected to via QGIS as well.

Seek out the communities that write and use the software you are using for more help bootstrapping yourself through the basics.
posted by hobu at 7:47 AM on March 9, 2010

PostGIS I'm sure is lovely, but I don't want to be a DBA again. SpatiaLite really has all the features I need.

So far, I've found the SpatiaLite tutorial and SpatiaLite Users groups relatively helpful, though the latter is mostly because the author of SpatiaLite appears driven to answer questions very promptly. I've joined a number of GIS forums, but they all seem to be moribund or very single-product based.
posted by scruss at 4:48 AM on March 12, 2010