AW: VS: [mapserver-users] Mapserver search performance

[Eichner, Andreas - SID-NLKM]

Hi. The first thing to note: editing a DBF with Excel & Co. seems to be
a _really_ bad idea. Those who tried that got Shapes wired to wrong
attribute lines. So DBF, SHP, SHX and QIX files have to be used as a
whole or will usually end up in a corrupted dataset. I would suggest
"ogr2ogr" from the GDAL suite. It's fast, reliable, can do joins and is
aware of the mentioned dependencies.
Please note that such a fileset can only provide a spatial index via a
QIX file. This is OK if you only want to filter by BBOX. If you want to
filter by attribute all lines of the DBF still need to be scanned. In
such cases it's wise to use ogr2ogr to split the data in pre-filtered
sets.
Using a more sophisticated database like PostGIS or SpatialLite can help
you implement more complex scenarios. Since MapServer has no native
driver for SpatialLite it's probably not as fast as it is supposed to
be. This mostly depends on OGRs implementation.

Greetings

> Is there a DBF editor out
> there that can be used to import the fields from any external data
> source into the shapefile attribute DBF without affecting the
> structure? I looked for a lot but they do not have the capability of
> doing a JOIN based on a common field and pulling data into the
> shapefile DBF automatically.