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I'm trying to take advantage of the many functions available in Postgis for dealing with latitude and longitude coordinate systems. However, I would like to add some altitude information to my database and I can't find the proper answer for which datatype should be used for properly holding Latitude, Longitude and Altitude in Postgis?
I have found that Geometry type is capable of X, Y and Z, but the Geography type only holds Latitude and Longitude. Is there and differences between both?
I don't see why geography can't hold Z. Did you try it?
As per the docs:
CREATE TABLE testgeog(gid serial PRIMARY KEY, the_geog geography(POINTZ,4326) );
For geometries, like PointZ which can store Z values, you can try the WKB or WKT formats for example.
WKB is particularly well suited for database.
Transformations are easily performed as it is an OGC standard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well-known_text
http://docs.opengeospatial.org/is/12-063r5/12-063r5.html
