PostGIS ⇆ AI

Finally got around to watching this gem: “Your Dorky Spatial Database is My Magic Answer Machine” by Brian Timoney. In this insightful and engaging #PostGISDay presentation, Brian explores how #AI can both use #PostGIS and be used from within PostGIS. A must-watch for anyone curious about the future of intelligent geospatial workflows!
Author

Ralph Straumann

Published

January 23, 2026

Finally got around to1 this open tab: “Your Dorky Spatial Database is My Magic Answer Machine”. Brian Timoney of the Timoney Group and Senior Developer Relations Engineer at IQGeo gave this presentation on PostGIS Day. In my experience, Brian is always good for both very astute and entertaining presentations, articles2, and quips3. In this talk, he speaks about, and demos, using AI on PostGIS and using AI from within PostGIS.4

From Brian’s announcement:

For 97% of the business world, “database” is a word with a limited set of unexciting associations: rows, columns, and tables residing in a walled fortress with surly gatekeepers fluent in that weird query language.

My PostGIS Day presentation is for the other 3%.

Easily the best 25 minutes on YouTube in this year, so far, down to and including the closing line.

Footnotes

  1. You know those open tabs to which you want to turn your attention to with enough time on your hands.↩︎

  2. A famous early work may be the series on map portals from 2013, starting with “Why Map Portals Don’t Work”, in my opinion, since long part of the geospatial canon.↩︎

  3. To just pick one: “Data is not the new oil. It is the old coal: difficult to mine, a burden to move, and intrinsically dirty.”↩︎

  4. The latter: using pgsql-openai by Paul Ramsey.↩︎