RyanDalton

7,930 reputation

11665

bio	website	linkedin.com/in/ryankdalton
	location	Whitefish, MT
	age	39
visits	member for	2 years, 7 months
	seen	16 mins ago
stats	profile views	672

I've been a career GIS user for 15+ years. I am particularly interested in extending Business Intelligence through spatial analysis. Examples include enhanced retail/real estate decision-making during site selection, trade area analysis, customer research, and marketing through demographic analysis.

I have been using Python more and more for process automation, developing new tools and database maniupulation.

Most of my career I've been in the ESRI camp, but am now starting to use more open-source tools (QGIS, PostGIS, GDAL/OGR, web-based GIS) so I can "choose the right tool" for the job.

	7,930 reputation	bio	website	linkedin.com/in/ryankdalton	visits	member for	2 years, 7 months
11665 badges		location	Whitefish, MT		seen	16 mins ago

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Apr 18	suggested	suggested edit on Google Earth portable solution and imagery data
Apr 18	answered	Creating Polys and Displaying geo points within. ( Where to start? )
Apr 15	comment	How to hide “internal” polygon boundaries? Good answer. While simple, creating multiple layer files that reference the same data layer, and simply applying the appropriate definition query to each can often be the quickest and simplest method of displaying this type of data.
Apr 15	answered	QGIS composer - How can I eliminate striping across transparent raster layers?
Apr 15	accepted	PostGIS feature compare function?
Apr 14	comment	PostGIS feature compare function? As an update to my previous comment, I have determined it is an issue with the "geometry" field. If I use pure text fields, the query works fine. If I use "=", the query works fine. It's just if I include "!=" and the "geometry" field in the row() statement that I get the error.
Apr 14	comment	PostGIS feature compare function? @Sean, thanks for you great update to the code. When I ran this and made the updates to the table names and attributes, I got the following error: "Could not choose a best candidate operator. You might need to add explicit type casts", referring to the "!=". Thoughts? Running Postgres 9.0.1 and PostGIS 1.5.2.
Apr 14	comment	PostGIS feature compare function? @Sean: I am so very close to making this work, but when I attempted to do a UNION (as I used in the ST_EQUALS answer) to include all of the new geometries, I couldn't get it to work because it said I needed the same number of rows in my union query. The Row()=Row() creates an boolean column that doesn't exist in my source data (part of the UNION statement), so how do I create/reference a "fake" column in my UNION query to match the ROW()=ROW() select statement?
Apr 13	revised	Compiling Python Scripts That Use ArcGIS Geoprocessing Tools edited tags
Apr 13	comment	PostGIS feature compare function? What I really wanted to get as a result were all geometries in layer A (updated) that had been added or changed since layer B (original). I was able to accomplish that result with the following syntax: SELECT A.fields FROM A EXCEPT SELECT A.fields FROM A,B WHERE ST_EQUALS(A.geom,B.geom). The result is all of the feature geometries from layer A that have changed or been added. Thanks!
Apr 13	comment	PostGIS feature compare function? Sean, this is a great concept that looks really promising. 1) This finds all features that are the same, how would I find all the changes? 2) What would be the best method to join this result back to the changed features (geometries), so that you could visually compare the changed features to the source features?
Apr 13	revised	PostGIS feature compare function? added 194 characters in body; added 8 characters in body
Apr 13	comment	Unable to save selected layer by attribute for ArcGIS Geoprocessing The basics looks good, I would expect it to work. To really get your script "perfect", I would recommend using ModelBuilder to drag/drop on your tools, make sure it works as expected, then export to Python which will build the correct code for you.
Apr 12	revised	GIS data for fast food industry added 271 characters in body; deleted 22 characters in body; edited body
Apr 12	answered	GIS data for fast food industry
Apr 12	comment	PostGIS feature compare function? It would definitely be easier to use versioning, except that the data is not owned or maintained by me. It is data that is provided in quarterly updates, in a variety of formats (usually shapefiles), and I want to find out which features and attributes have changed between updates.
Apr 12	asked	PostGIS feature compare function?
Apr 7	revised	Using a different Python IDE/debugger for ArcGIS added 24 characters in body
Apr 7	answered	How can I effectively debug arcpy Python scripts?
Apr 7	comment	How can I effectively debug arcpy Python scripts? This looks to be a new enhancement for ArcGIS 10, correct? I don't see this setting option for 9.3.