I wanted to get rid of long line segments in my data. Since I don’t know any software tools off the top of my head that would do the job, I decided to code it myself. I have already stored everything in a spatially-enabled PostgreSQL table, and to be honest, recently I am more interested in manipulating data at the database level to save some time. So, instead of writing a python script and looping through a cursor, I created a function which I am calling in SQL queries. The picture below gives an overview of what the following function does. Basically, it breaks input geometries at line segments that exceed a certain threshold in length. Red means “no bueno”, green means “yaay!”.
