Serving A Large Archive an openpap-client/wms-server

[John Bonk]

We have a lot of data on an opendap server. We had plans for a 
MapServer opendap-client/wms-server--in other words we wanted to build 
a MapServer that will serve raster data from our opendap server.

  We were working on a prototype that will serve one of our products. 
The product consists of monthly files, each file contains 2 parameters 
per file. At present there are over 80 months (files) of data.

  I still consider myself a novice and may have some misconceptions 
about MapServer, but my understanding is that to offer this data I will 
need a mapfile with over 160 layers--one for each file times 2 for the 
2 parameters.

  I read in one of the documents 
(http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/doc44/mapfile-reference.html) that there 
is a 50 layer limit for a mapfile. The document said that this limit 
could be raised by making a change to map.h. However, some of our 
products have files containing over a hundred parameters. I estimate 
that if we wanted to offer each of the parameters in each file for 
several of our products, we would need a mapfile with hundreds of 
thousands layers. Are we expecting too much from mapserver?

 Is there any way around this problem?

  Does anyone have any suggestions for serving data that is scattered 
through thousands of files?