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When “one size fits all” fails: PostGIS bounding boxes for maps

Blog post from Felt

Post Details
Company
Date Published
Author
Joe Hermann, Engineer
Word Count
691
Company Posts That Month
8
Language
English
Hacker News Points
-
Post removed?
No
Summary

Felt, a mapping company, focuses on delivering an intuitive data interaction experience by making complex data layers easily accessible through features like fast tile delivery and interactive geometric attributes. The challenge lies in the subjective nature of creating effective maps and the difficulty of implementing universal solutions. To address this, Felt engineers embrace heuristics when determining the extent of data layers, using PostGIS to calculate bounding boxes for large datasets. They leverage PostGIS functions like ST_Extent and ST_EstimatedExtent to optimize performance, with ST_EstimatedExtent providing a significantly faster, though slightly less precise, estimation of spatial data extents. This approach allows Felt to effectively manage large data layers while maintaining efficient frontend performance.

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