PostGIS Day is a chance to learn how others are making use of PostGIS and exchange ideas to make the best out of it.

PostGIS of course is the extension that adds to PostgreSQL support for storing, indexing, and querying geospatial data.
It is very popular among professionals such as data scientists, developers, and engineers who need to analyze complex geographic (spatial) data alongside regular data stored in the relational part of the database. Sectors that it is used in include web mapping services, navigation applications, defense, agriculture and finance.

PostGIS Day then is an annual event hosted by Snowflake where the community meets to learn more about Spatial Databases and Geospatial Analytics as well as creative use cases of PostGIS in the wild.

The event was streamed but for those who couldn't make it, the sessions have now been published up on Youtube as a playlist. With many interesting talks available, we singled out a few we feel that must be watched first.

So let's begin with the basics, that is the primary use of Postgis, that of using PostgreSQL as the primary geographical database, complemented by the spatial extension. This is something the IGN, the reference public operator for geographic and forest information of France has been doing for more than two decades.

The talk given by Cedric Dupré, a geospatial data architect and database expert at IGN France, takes us through the gradual but well worth the effort adoption of PostgreSQL and PostGIS for the primary spatial engine that manages national data to support a wide range of public mapping services.

As we live in the era of AI, the next talk "Working With Geospatial Embeddings with PostGIS And PGVector" combines the best of both worlds; geospatial data sprinkled with vectors. What does this combo enable? semantic search and AI-driven similarity queries over maps, rasters, and vector data sets.

The talk goes through that process and focuses especially on the technical challenges of combining spatial filters with vector indices. Yet another AI related talk was "PostGIS In the Age Of AI: Teaching Claude To Think Spatially" where it went through how to employ natural language to query and interact with maps.

Last but not least on our list of recommended to watch first talks, has to be "Snowflake And PostGIS Together". Snowflake is always at the forefront of innovation with its excellent scalability and performance, cost efficiency and zero management overhead, hence a move to blend spatial data and PostGIS in is a very intriguing proposition.

The talk highlights that this proposition is now a reality and showcases how to use both of them together; PostGIS handles the transactional geospatial tasks while Snowflake manages the massive analytical workloads.

Other talks that caught our attention were "pg_lake: An Open Source Postgres Extension For Geospatial Object Storage" and "The Power Of PostGIS And Apache Sedona".

Saying that, there's a total of 17 great talks on the playlist so you better start watching now! 

More Information

PostGIS Day 2025 playlist 

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