I’m putting the finishing touches on the revamped QGIS Class. To recap – I’ve got one. One day. Three hundred and something bucks for the day. I wrote a second day and taught it once. It was hard. So hard everyone was looking at me at the end of Day two and going “Why?”.
The class is a mixed bag of sorts. Either no one signs up for it or I’m turning people away. When you talk to people it’s an interesting discussion on why they are in the class. Contrary to popular belief Desktop GIS isn’t dead. It is changing though. Which has led to a revamp of the idea of the class or what I need to do to make this training idea even more relevant to 2016.
One thing I did was shorten the discussion on shapefiles. I have one section where you have to make an edit. This edit experience now focuses on spatialite. There is a short discussion on why this is a good thing and I’m adding a page on the geopackage. Why?
My customer base isn’t glamorous. They also are afflicted with 10+ years of desktop mindset. So why not change it up and show the fun in a spatially enabled database. Yes – not as complicated or powerful as postgis – BUT – you get the idea you may not have to open a desktop product to search by buffer. Maybe you can do some very simple things and never open desktop. If you are in Desktop (QGIS) you’ve got the DB Manger which allows you to toss spatial SQL against a database. All that opens up the idea that maybe there is more than one way (again) to maintain your GIS data.
A few years ago I made a joke (and it wasn’t that bad of a joke compared to normal) that when ESRI brought python into the desktop experience it made 3/4 of the GIS folk think they were python programmers. I did for a while. “LEMME WRITE A SCRIPT TO DO THAT”. Now I’m getting “I know spatial databases because we keep everything in SQL Server.” and what I’m finding is that’s not the case. I’ve done enough “interacting” with SDE/Oracle to know that changes nothing except where you are storing your stuff. You’ve got your DB Admins to make sure things get vacuumed and DB things get done.
Anyway – stay tuned as a class/tutorial happens on Spatialite. I’m unsure of how I’m doing this exactly but I started drafting the outline yesterday as I worked through some data in the Spatilite GUI. Is this a good thing? I have no idea. It does add another tool to your GIS toolbox and I’ll for making your life easier/more fun.
