PgConf.Russia 2017

I love complex knowledge domains, strong typing in applications, and 3NF, but I hate ORM. That is why I’ve been actively storing serialized structures in JSON fields (even before the JSON type was introduced). In this talk, I will tell you about some specifics of storing complex structures within DBMS fields, what problems can arise, and how to cushion the blow.

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Nowadays one can make a decent urban research based simply on public datasets, making interesting and unexpected insights. In the presentation, I'll show examples of these calculations in PostGIS, the industry standard de-facto.

But just PostGIS is not enough. You need tools to import, verify and visualize the data. It's critically important to visualize the data live, to debug your calculations and shorten iterations. I'll describe all these steps:

1. Collecting the data: public API, OpenStreetMap; direct user input.
2. 3rd party APIs for calculations.
3. Visualization of GIS and other sorts of data: QGIS, Matplotlib, Zeppelin integrated with PostGIS.
4. Debugging the calculations: live visualization (Arc, QGIS, NextGIS Web)
5. Scripting and minimizing the chores: Makefile, Gulp

This tutorial is about various applied JSON usage patterns and the related PostgreSQL functionality. We will discuss data storage in the JSON format, retrieving, changing, and searching such data, JSON features for simple SQL queries, as well as using JSON in stored procedures in different languages. You’ll get hands-on experience with some of the discussed problems on the provided virtual machines.

MoySklad online service includes important component - semiautomatic database conversion framework. Its history and supported conversions are subject of this speech.

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