Gen.Maps is slow

[Eric Kostello]

Hello Grassu list,

I used the Gen.Maps script to generate the census tract and block groups for one
census tract in Los Angeles county.

It took 3 hours on a Sparc 2.

Are the huge sizes of the la.Master files and the la.rimdb3 files the problem?

ll */la.Master
-rw-r--r--  1 kostello 14425339 Apr 22 21:35 dig/la.Master
-rw-r--r--  1 kostello 14143950 Aug  5  1992 dig_att/la.Master
-rw-r--r--  1 kostello 38080910 Apr 22 21:39 dig_plus/la.Master

ll rim/*/la.*
-rw-r--r--  1 kostello    16384 Jul 31  1992 rim/vect/la.rimdb1
-rw-r--r--  1 kostello 105340928 Aug  3  1992 rim/vect/la.rimdb2
-rw-r--r--  1 kostello 16648128 Jul 31  1992 rim/vect/la.rimdb3

I see three possible solutions for generating a complete set of census
tract and block group maps for LA:

1. Give up a computer for a month or two and wait.

2. Select all the census and block group boundaries from the type 1 file
   and rebuild the database with only those in it. And then hope that I
   don't run in to the same problem.

3. Write a script that will do number 2 using the new tiger data import
   scripts which will automatically do all 1652 tracts and block groups
   for me, but which does not use the RIM scripts.


Once this is done, I would like to create raster maps of the census tracts.
Do the areas have to be labeled by hand (in order to create maps with all the
cells in a census tract having the same value)? Or, is there a way to automate
the process?


Thanks,

Eric Kostello
kostello at muir.sscnet.ucla.edu