PostGIS

FIRST-HAND READS

What people reported, in their own words. Every line links to where it was said.

• “I've used PostGIS because it made sense to be able to make geo query when latlon is already a (small) part of your schema.”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-07-06

• “Linking SagaGIS with PostGIS to do pre/post wildfire analysis was my jam.”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-05-08

• “PostGIS powers climate matching, so you can find gardeners in your bioregion and see what's actually working in similar growing conditions”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-03-03

• “PostGIS took multiple days to process the million-vertex Norwegian national parks”

  NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-01-19

• “learning all the magic of PostGIS - if you ever have an idea that involves geospatial data or maps, go ahead and try build it with PostGIS in the db.”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-01-12

• “I can't really do anything with it until it's loaded in to PostGIS, so this would save a ton of time/storage space over that”

  NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2025-06-11

• “I'm a huge fan of. Charts are hand-authored by government hydrography offices and encoded into a format called "S-57". These files contain spatial data for a small area, and different charts cover different zoom levels. This presents a few problems for web apps: Charts of different intended zoom levels cover other data, the full chart dataset is too large to stream, and charts aren't divided into xyz tiles cleanly. To solve this, I run a bespoke pipeline which processes all nautical chart data into an internal format using PostGIS. From there, I merge all chart data together, overlaying higher accuracy charts over the lower accuracy charts. The pipeline performs a lot of data validation & reconciliation to remove bad data, then simplifies & renders to vector tiles. PostGIS is critical to this - I started by using a bunch of python geometry manipulation libraries, and slowly shifted more and more of the processing into SQL queries as I realized how fast and intuitive it is.”

  POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2025-05-11

• “I've been able to "CREATE EXTENSION postgis;" for more than a decade”

  POSITIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2025-05-03

• “a brutally hacky pipeline involving PostGIS, EMR, and Pig, and it was hell”

  NEGATIVE · Hacker News · 2025-04-28

• “migrated to PosrgreSQL with PostGIS for far superior GIS support”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2024-09-24

• “We had a really good experience with it combined with PostGIS. Scenarios like "Show sensors on a map with value graphs for each sensor" can be done in a single query, and it's fast and beautiful.”

  POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2024-08-03

• “randomly crashes for me when viewing any postgis related result sets”

  NEGATIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2024-07-21