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Comment by WD-42 | Hacker News Reader

Is it that much simpler than ‘load extension postgis’? I know geos and gdal have always kinda been a pain, but I feel like docker has abstracted it all away anyway. ‘docker pull postgis’ is pretty easy, granted I’m not familiar with what else duckdb offers.

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Yes. The difference between provisioning a server and running 'install spatial' in a CLI is night and day.

Docker has been a big improvement (when I was first learning PostGIS, the amount of time I had to hunt for proj directories or compile software just to install the plugin was a major hurdle), but it's many steps away from:

``` $ duckdb D install spatial; ```

I mean I like duckdb but this feels like you're pushing for it. On my system postgis comes from apt install, and it's one command to activate the "plugin". Is the night and day part not having to run random sh script from the internet to install software on my system?

DuckDB doesn't require a running server. I run duckdb in a terminal, query 10,000 CSV or parquet files and run SQL on them while joining to data hosted in sqlite, a separate duckdb file using its native format, or even Postgres.

That’s great! The difference is you’re familiar and know how to do that

Getting started from 0 with geo can be difficult for those unfamiliar. DuckDB packages everything into one line with one dependency.

https://postgresapp.com

What do you mean by "provisioning a server"? That's a strange requirement. You can install Postgis on a macbook in one command, or actually on all 3 major OS's in one command: "brew install postgis", "apt-get install postgresql-postgis, and "choco install postgis-9.3". Does DuckDB not require a "server" or a "computer"? What does Docker have to do with anything? This is a very confusing train of thought.

> Does DuckDB not require a "server"

No, it works like SQLite.

PostGIS is included in Postgres.app which is a single executable for Mac. DuckDB appears also to be a single file download for Mac. I’m not sure your “when I was first learning PostGIS” experience reflects the current situation.

https://postgresapp.com/

It is not simpler. I use it with testcontainers in the notebooks usually https://testcontainers-python.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

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