What use case is survey.geometry used for?

[rbroth]

We're storing geometry for the area covered by surveys, but do we need to? Can't we just link to a "country" table?

Arguments for doing it the way we're doing it now:

• Countries breaking apart e.g. Sudan
• Surveys that cover multiple countries

Against:

• It takes up lots of space

@bgsandan What is the actual use case that the data is used for? It's not aggregation, that's a different table. Will users care about "historical" surveys?

[bgsandan]

Pretty much the arguments for, plus potentially surveys that cover a smaller geographic area than a country.

Storage is cheap and we won't have that many surveys!

[rbroth]

What are we actually using the data for though? Is it for displaying the available datasets on a map for the user to select? For somehow aggregating data from multiple surveys? Something else?

[bgsandan]

Primarily for spatial query of which datasets intersect with aggregation location of interest (which could be a country). Quite possible that they will also be displayed on a map at some point. These are essentially an example of data of type 1 from the slide the other day