PostGIS and SpatiaLite offer a large number of spatial query operations, including buffers, intersections, and spatial joins. It’s really useful, especially when you’re still experimenting, to visualize your results without having to create a new spatial table, spatial view, or exporting to a shapefile or other GIS data format. Fortunately, there are several ways to do this, including at least three plugins for Quantum GIS: Fast SQL Layer, PostGIS Query Editor, and RT SQL Layer. In this blog post I will walk you through using Fast SQL Layer. Continue Reading »

Why SpatiaLite?

I spent this weekend getting the SpatiaLite GUI installed, with help from SpatiaLite Users Google Group. SpatiaLite is an open source source geodatabase built on top of SQLite, itself an open source database. As a lightweight, “server-less” database, SQLite is frequently used as an embedded database by other applications, including Firefox, Google Chrome, Skype, iTunes, Clementine (my preferred FOSS music player), and Dropbox (on the client side). Continue Reading »