neaRThings A spatial doodle

Of Legacy & Free SAS

28 Feb 2025

Legacy CartoDB

The image above was highlight of an email I received mid-February this year,a few days after I had demonstrated my spatial data visualisation abilities to an interested party. One of my favourite posts which relied on CartoDB came to mind. I got the motivation to preserve this portion of my portfolio of work.

Just Cut to The Chase.

Early Cloud

This made me reminisce all the free, limited use cloud services that scratched a tinkeror’s itch.How at one time I used RedHat’s OpenShift to host GeoServer and ran a PostGIS server on Digital Ocean, just to test the PostgreSQL database connection abilities of QGIS. It is magic to see a table turn to vectors for someone whose background in spatial science is a GIS software environment.

GeoServer on OpenShift Digital Ocean

Migrating Maps

The email from CartoDB gave the next steps to the email heading

Your CARTO legacy account will be retired on March 31st, 2025 A new CARTO platform had been launched nearly 4 years earlier (2021).

I determined I was indeed still using the legacy platform. I signed up to the new platform.

CartoDB Maps

Some of my Carto maps.

There were also some Kepler.gl associated maps. These I didn’t care to preserve. Additionally there were datasets, linked to the maps, which needed to be preserved.

Datasets

Some datasets.

Data Wherehouse

The ‘new’ CARTO platform had some catchy requirements for a tinkeror but, luckily… I could make use of their own Carto Data Warehouse. However, data needed to be migrated and maps to be recreated.

I created an account on the New CARTO platform. Indeed it carries the shiny feel of 2025 web technologies.

  • Downloaded datasets from the Legacy account, chose the CSV file format.
  • Uploaded the data (7) into the data warehouse connection - Carto Data Warehouse (carto_dw).
  • Default import settings on data types are fine but not when time is converted to text.
  • I fiddled with TIME, TIMESTAMP and DATE till I had the GPS Logs data correctly formatted.

Data Import into CartoDB3

Imported data:

Data Imported into CartoDB3

No Yes Visualisation Here

Before spending more effort in coming up with a visualisation, I reviewed Carto’s plans. There is none free there - except trial. So I reluctantly stopped there. Whatever I was going to create here, was going to last for 14 days. Well, I received an onboarding email from Carto while I was still busy with this blog post. I explained that I was not going to complete the migration because there was no (free) plan to meet my use case of the platform. To my delight, Carto responded a few hours later informing my plan had been migrated to CARTO Cloud Native. So finally, my visualisations can be preserved.

No More Free Lunch!

Carto.com is a breath of fresh air. The tools in there are easy to use and quite intuitive. I tinkered a bit and came up with the below: (Click the Play button.)

Or Interact with the ‘bigger’ map here.

The final animation is no different from the one in the previous version of Carto. except that I couldn’t yet figure out how to let the point ‘persist’ for a bit longer after display.

#Postscript

Thanks to Carto’s generosity I could preserve an element in my Portfolio of work. I have four other maps to recreate, so I’ll save more time to delve into Carto.