PostGIS tips: Working with geometry columns and projection systems

I put these docs together in an effort to help my colleagues at the City of Boston get acquainted with PostGIS. <a href="https://medium.com/@paylakatel/part-1-postgis-at-the-city-of-boston-9476293d71c2" rel="noopener">You can find Part 1 here</a>. This section walks through adding a geometry column to a dataset, dealing with projection systems, and getting x/y values from a geometry column. <h1>Adding and Populating a Geometry Column</h1> PostGIS stores a table’s spatial information in geometry columns. Usually these columns have the word “geom” floating around in their name. If you select * on a table with a geometry column, the geom column will look like a long series of nonsense. Frequently, long/lat values get stored in columns in a database or spreadsheet. To make these into a geometry column that PostGIS understands, we: <a href="https://medium.com/@paylakatel/part-2-postgis-at-the-city-of-boston-711cf30cf1f3">Website</a>