[Qgis-user] alternatives to join attributes

[Edmond, Brian S]

Katie,

Your foray into PostgreSQL and PostGIS will not be wasted if you plan to do more GIS in the future.  Even if you do it only for this project, it should help you tremendously.  I routinely plot 7K+ unique points as a PostGIS layer using QGIS and the time to plot them is almost instantaneous.  Furthermore, a whole world of spatial capabilities will open to you with all of the PostGIS functions available to do analysis on your data.  I do have an iMac (at work), but I run my setup on a Kubuntu machine (at home) so I might be able to help you a little bit there.

Start by installing PostgreSQL and getting some familiarity with it.  It will help if you know SQL and have worked with databases before (they are all essentially the same from a user POV).  The desktop tool pgAdmin will help you guify PostgreSQL a bit, but you'll still need to do a few things manually or from the command line.  I checked and there is a Mac OS port for pgAdmin.  (I prefer using phpPgAdmin, but it would require that you have a web server and PHP installed on your Mac.)

Good luck!

B



From: qgis-user-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [mailto:qgis-user-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Carbonari, Katie (IS)
Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 9:11 AM
To: David Fawcett
Cc: qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: RE: [Qgis-user] alternatives to join attributes


I tried doing that at one point, but I've never used databases before and didn't get how to include them into QGIS. I tried going under "Add PostGIS Table" but wasn't really sure how to connect to my database. I have my dbf files stored locally on my machine, yet the gui wants me to make a "PostgreSQL Connection"; what exactly is that and is there a more simple way to access my dbf files?

Thanks,
katie


-----Original Message-----
From: David Fawcett [mailto:david.fawcett at gmail.com]
Sent: Thu 12/17/2009 9:57 AM
To: Carbonari, Katie (IS)
Cc: qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: [Qgis-user] alternatives to join attributes

Have you thought about loading the data into PostGIS?  You would load
the data into the db and then be able to query and display only the
data that you want at any time.

David.

On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 8:46 AM, Carbonari, Katie (IS)
<Katie.Carbonari at ngc.com> wrote:
> Good morning. I have a lot of data I need to visualize in QGIS (142 time
> steps, each with over 200,000 points). I need a way to quickly and easily
> load this data in QGIS. All of my data is in separate .csv files (one file
> per time step). I load each file via the csv plug-in and then use join
> attributes to connect my csv data to the polygon data that defines my grid.
> Join attributes takes forever (trying to do 4,000 points took an hour). Any
> one know of any other, faster way to do this? Or a way to speed up my join
> attributes? I know 200,000 points is a lot to ask and can easily cut that
> down a bit, but an hour to do 4000 points seems very slow. At that rate, it
> would take 3 weeks to load the entire time series into QGIS. I'm running the
> latest version of QGIS (Mimas) on a Mac OsX.
>
> Thanks,
> Katie
>
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