Installing a spatial database

In this book, we are going to use one of the most popular and powerful geospatial databases: PostGIS. PostGIS is an extension to the freely available PostgreSQL relational database. To use it in our Python programs, we need to install three separate pieces of software:

• The PostgreSQL database server itself

• The PostGIS extension to PostgreSQL

• The psycopg2 database adapter for Python

  Note

  PostgreSQL is often referred to simply as Postgres. We will use this more colloquial name regularly throughout this book.

Let's work through the process of installing each of these pieces of software in turn.

Installing PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL (http://postgresql.org) is one of the most powerful open source relational databases available. While it has a reputation for being difficult to set up and use, it's not too tricky, and with prebuilt installers available for every major operating system the setup process is now quite straightforward.

Let's go ahead and get PostgreSQL installed on...