Speeding up load time for huge SHP files

[Jan Hartmann]

Thanks Sebastian. I had heard of that, but I never used it, based on my 
expeience with ArcView and ArcGIS; crashes and funny maps.

Jan

Sebastian Walter wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Jan Hartmann wrote:
>> How would you produce that simplified version is none is available
>> already?
> 
> A very conveniant way of simplifying big shapefiles is dumping them in
> PostGis/Postgresql using shape2pgsql, then creating a new geometry
> column and fill the data with "UPDATE <table> SET <newcolumn> =
> simplify(the_geom,0.01)
> where the 0.01 is the tolerance factor, this number works well for me in
> longlat units. Then you can dump the table back to a shapefile using
> pgsql2shp.
> 
> This way, simplifying huge shapefiles is really fast and stable, while
> in ArcGIS it's taking hours, and then just crashes.
> 
> Regards,
> Sebastian
>