Great fun at the Maryland State GIS conference (@tugis) where I had over 20 people attend my Big Data Geo-Analytics with Postgres workshop. And, like other workhops I’ve taught at Tugis (see here, here, and here), the evaluations were really strong.
I should remind you that this was not your run of the mill workshop. This was really advanced stuff where we discussed indexing, parallel processing, multi-processing, the central limit theorem, and also processed gigabytes of data. I warned people beforehand that this was not an introductory workshop. And, people responded perfectly. Everyone in attendance was prepared for the material, and that is what made the workshop go so well.
The full workshop results are here. But, as far as highlights, here are the main take-aways:
I love it when professionals taking my workshop feel as though it has value to their career. The reality is, why take a workshop that won’t help you in your career? I’m so happy that people see this as valuable to their career.
This response was great. Usually, I get about 30% of the people to give the workshop a 10/10 (I get other 9s and 8s, of course). But in this case, 50% of the people gave this a 10/10. That is really huge. So, I know that I am teaching this content in the right way. When asked what they liked best, some of my favorite positive quotes are:
Technical and Detailed. Great teacher explanation. Really good!
Practical advice, in-depth enough to really learn something useful (most one-day workshops do not provide as much useful info and advice as this one).
The optimization of the database and processing (parallel processing in particular).
Learning about Postgres and the ability to run sql queries rather than run step by step in ArcGIS
Using Postgres to utilize data organization and data manipulation was great insight. It showed me postgres is a great alternative to SQL server or Oracle
Art knows his material and keeps the class engaged. Lots of new information.
The discussions on multiprocessing, indexes, and using statistical estimation were most useful to me. When asked to provide ways to make the workshop better, these were some of my favorite quotes:
Nothing – good job. Thanks
Slower pace of the lessons. It was like drinking water out of a firehose.
Make it two days, or a week long, or a full semester!
I thought it was pretty good as is, I can’t think of anything off hand.
Have the materials available ahead of time for review. Would be useful to go deeper into how to use this at work and what we need to get started. Nothing – good job. Thanks
Slower pace of the lessons. It was like drinking water out of a firehose.
Make it two days, or a week long, or a full semester!
I thought it was pretty good as is, I can’t think of anything off hand. So there you have it. Another successful workshop teaching GIS professionals about big data analytics. If you want to learn more about free and open source GIS, whether its QGIS, Postgres/PostGIS, GDAL, Geoserver, or Python and SQL, take a look at the courses I offer through gisadvisor.com. Finally, I want to start offering this big data analytics workshop with Postgres and PostGIS during the year. I would be happy to come to your city or GIS conference to teach the class. Just send me a note, and we can work out a way to get me to your area to introduce GIS professionals to more FOSS4g contents.