[gdal-dev] netCDF to Shapefile

[Paolo Corti]

On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 3:51 AM, Manuel Rainer <manuelrainer at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I would like to convert certain time slices (records) out of a netCDF file
> to a Shapefile.
> The netCDF file has 7> GB, so what is the best proceed to get an appropriate
> performance?
> I mean, should the data be cached (e.g. in an ASCII file, ...)
> before writing a Shapefile or can the shp directly be generated?
> Perhaps you have some experiences...

Hi
I don't know what you mean with performance (maybe the time needed to
make the export or the subsequent access to them?), but as far as I
remember shapefile has a file size
limit of 2 Gb, I personally would avoid that approach.
Here PostGis seems to well suit in the scenario, but if you don't have
the possibility to access/create a PostGis infrastructure, I
personally would give a try to Spatialite.

If performance are really a concern, you could instead opt for a NoSQL
database: CouchDb has a nice spatial module [0] as far as I have
heard.
You could use the shp2geocouch approach utility [1] (first export to json with
ogr2ogr then json to couchdb) for loading your data.
Please note that if you opt for the latest, I am not sure if you will
have tools for symbology and map creation at this time, neither you
can use the GDAL API.

best regards
Paolo

[0] http://vmx.cx/blog/2009-11-17/geodata-and-couchdb.htm
[1] https://github.com/maxogden/shp2geocouch/blob/master/bin/shp2geocouch

-- 
Paolo Corti
Geospatial software developer
web: http://www.paolocorti.net
twitter: @paolo_corti