[GRASSLIST:914] Handling millions of points in GRASS...

[David Finlayson]

I have a bathymetry project that is attempting to collect and map every 
sounding ever collected for Puget Sound, Washington. So far, I have 
several million soundings stored in a MySQL database. But with the new 
Sonar aboard our vessel, the new interest in bathymetric LIDAR and 
cooperation with NOAA, that number is expected to grow exponentially in 
the next few years.

What is the best way to get this data into GRASS?  What's the best way 
to manage it?

I know that RDBMS support is coming soon and that (apparently) PostGIS 
is already functional on some platforms (Linux, Cygwin?).  But what is 
the word from the trenches?  I have been very happy with MySQL and would 
rather use this if functionality is comparable to PostGres, but it would 
be better to move now rather than wait if necessary...

A major task that needs to be handled is some way to select points both 
by spatial location (polygons not boxes) and by attributes such as age, 
survey, and platform.  Currently, I have a table of soundings (x,y,z,ID) 
and a table of headers  (ID,date,platform,etc.) and I load it into 
ArcGIS (ESRI, inc.) through ODBC where I can grid up the data into 
rasters for further analysis. Hence, I am currently dependent on Windows.

Thanks for your thoughts.

-- 
David Finlayson
School of Oceanography
Box 357940
University of Washington
Seattle, WA  98195-7940
USA

Office: Marine Sciences Building, Room 112
Phone: (206) 616-9407
Web: http://students.washington.edu/dfinlays