MapServer Capabilities

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Campbell, Keith A wrote:
> Thanks Steve.
> 
> Does that mean that any layer based on a SQL Server DB (an ordinary
> layer without a join) would be relatively slow?

I believe only postgis has spatial indexes. You would need to read the 
docs on OGR, it provides an ODBC connection that is basicaly used to 
support dynamic data as a layer. It also has basic support for JOINs 
between shapefiles and a database. I think this will suffer from poor 
performance if you have a large dataset.

> Is it possible to create feature joins as I've described with other DB
> types?

Yes, if the database supports ODBC, but all the same problems will exist.

Only PostGIS/postgres have good native support built into mapserver and 
a robust support gor geometry built into the database.

-Steve W

> Keith
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Stephen Woodbridge [mailto:woodbri at swoodbridge.com] 
> Sent: 08 September 2006 01:25
> To: Campbell, Keith A
> Cc: MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU
> Subject: Re: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] MapServer Capabilities
> 
> Campbell, Keith A wrote:
>>
>> I wish to establish the capabilities of MapServer as regards feature 
>> joins. What I would like to do is create a map that has a number of 
>> layers based on SHP file data. The display of the entities within the 
>> SHP files needs to be themed based on attribute data held in a SQL 
>> Server database. So the Feature ID of an object in the SHP file has a 
>> corresponding ID in a record in the DB. Is this possible with
> MapServer?
>> If so, how difficult is it?
> 
> You might be able to do this with GDAL/OGR, but it will not be fast. The
> ideal way to do this is to use postGIS to store the geometry and
> attributes, then you can do this easily and it will be fast.
> 
> -Steve W.
> 
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