The objective of this presentation is to show the effective use of PostgreSQL to manage Geographic Information System data (hereby referred to as GIS).
The bulk of the data for Mecklenburg County, NC is edited and created with the use of ESRI‘s ArcGIS software. However, in the recent years the county has made a bold switch from SQL server to PostgreSQL for the backend database. This was a very challenging decision since we were one of the first in the country to make this switch. This was evident three years ago; during the ESRI International User Conference when there were only six people attending the session titled “Database Administration with PostgreSQL”. There was next to little documentation or help available either online or over the phone. Mecklenburg County had decided to maintain the production GIS databases with the help of ESRI’s SDE and PostgreSQL. Most of the data we receive comes from SQL server. The ETL packages which were in SSIS had to be rebuilt in Kettle.