With libelo we are building a platform for discovering parks and nature highlights. Almost all entities in our platform have a location attached: parks have boundaries, highlights like waterfalls or viewpoints have a precise coordinate, and users browse the app with their current position in hand. That means almost every interesting query the backend runs is spatial in some way. Which parks are nearby? Which park contains this highlight? What is the closest trail to where I am standing right now? You could answer those questions by pulling coordinates out of the database and doing the math in application code. For a small dataset that works. The moment your dataset grows (people are adding new highlights every daily) and you want to filter and sort spatially at query time, you need the database to do that work. PostGIS is the extension that gives PostgreSQL exactly that capability, and it is available out of the box on Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server.…