Performing Geospatial Analysis in PostgreSQL

In addition to looking at time-series data to better understand trends, we can also use geospatial information (such as city, country, or latitude and longitude) to better understand our customers. For example, governments use geospatial analysis to better understand regional economic differences, while a ride-sharing platform might use geospatial data to find the closest driver for a given customer.

We can represent a geospatial location using latitude and longitude coordinates, and this will be the fundamental building block for us to begin geospatial analysis.

Latitude and Longitude

When we think about locations, we often think about them in terms of the address—the city, state, country, or postal code that is assigned to the location that we are interested in. From an analytics perspective, this is sometimes OK. For example, you can look at the sales volume by city and come up with meaningful results about which cities...