PostGIS Gotchas: the things you didn’t know that lead to confusion and dismay
PostGIS adds spatial types to the database, so they can be used “just like any other type”. But unfortunately, spatial types aren’t quite like other types: they’re bigger, they require a lot of complicated algorithms to reason with, and they are built against an implicit model of the world that is generally understood by GIS people but can be a foreign world to database people. This can lead to Gotchas: things that we think should, in a rational world, work fine, but for some reason don’t. This talk will cover the things that make PostGIS different from other database extensions, and the gotchas that arise from those things, so you can use PostGIS without being Got.
