New Course: Introduction to spatial databases with PostGIS and QGIS

Thanks for your interest in this course. I’m very excited to release it as I believe that the combination of QGIS 3.0 and PostGIS amounts to an open-source “Killer App”.  It solves many frustrating problems that I had to deal with throughout my career as the GIS specialist for small to medium sized environmental consulting companies. I think it is equally applicable to any organization that is outgrowing single-user desktop GIS but unable to pay the ten’s of thousands of dollars required to move into multi-user enterprise databases with commercial GIS software. It took quite a bit of effort to learn how to do this on my own and my hope, as always, is to help others navigate this technology without repeating the mistakes I made.

This course is intended to provide an introduction to spatial databases in general and PostGIS in particular to GIS professionals who are interested in expanding their skillset to multi-user enterprise level spatial databases. This course uses the latest (as of 2/18) versions of PostgreSQL (10.1), PostGIS (2.4), and QGIS (3.0). I believe it is the most current and thorough course on spatial databases available today. You will learn

• What a spatial database is and why you would want to use one.
• What SQL is, why you would want to use it, and how it can be applied to geospatial concepts.
• How to install PostGIS locally for development purposes and how to access a production version via a network or the internet.
• How to load your spatial data into PostGIS and access it from a variety of clients, especially QGIS
• The basics of SQL for both spatial and non-spatial queries
• How to validate data and control user access with the tools built-in to PostGIS
• Optimizing your queries for the best performance
• How to work with raster data in PostGIS
• The basics of programming custom functions with PL/pgSQL
• The basics of database administration to keep your database operating smoothly

This course has over 10 hours of content and is available NOW on Udemy.com using this link.

If you want to learn more about what spatial databases are and why you would want to use them before purchasing, please read my blog post What can a spatial database do for you?

Also see other courses available on Web GIS programmming and QGIS 3.0 on my courses page.