Citus Blog

The latest episode of Path To Citus Con—the monthly podcast for developers who love Postgres—is now out. This episode featured guests Paul Ramsey and Regina Obe on the topic “Why people care about PostGIS and Postgres”.

The conversation was all about PostGIS, a geospatial extension to Postgres which just happens to be one the most popular Postgres extensions. This episode was fairly technical, but still fascinating. The discussion ranged all the way from cartesian math at one point to how it’s very difficult to construct a database these days without a location component. This episode of Path To Citus Con focuses on the geospatial world of Postgres and shows how “where” is one of the fundamental things we all want to know about.

In this post, you’ll get a bit of backstory on the topic and the guests—both with a long history with PostGIS—of this episode of Path To Citus Con; and you’ll get a peek at key moments from this show, including the extensibility of Postgres demonstrated by PostGIS, “where” as the universal foreign key, and more. At the end of the post, you’ll find links of where you can listen to this and every episode of the podcast. We hope you love these “human side of Postgres” podcast episodes.

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GPS has become part of our daily life. GPS is in cars for navigation, in smartphones helping us to find places, and more recently GPS has been helping us to avoid getting infected by COVID-19. Managing and analyzing mobility tracks is the core of my work. My group in Université libre de Bruxelles specializes in mobility data management. We build an open source database system for spatiotemporal trajectories, called MobilityDB. MobilityDB adds support for temporal and spatiotemporal objects to the Postgres database and its spatial extension, PostGIS. If you're not yet familiar with spatiotemporal trajectories, not to worry, we'll walk through some movement trajectories for a public transport bus in just a bit.

One of my team's projects is to develop a distributed version of MobilityDB. This is where we came in touch with the Citus extension to Postgres and the Citus engineering team. This post presents issues and solutions for distributed query processing of movement trajectory data. GPS is the most common source of trajectory data, but the ideas in this post also apply to movement trajectories collected by other location tracking sensors, such as radar systems for aircraft, and AIS systems for sea vessels.

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