[GRASS-user] Large vector files

[Hamish]

Jonathan Greenberg wrote:
> 
> Case in point: I just got this error on a v.in.ascii import of a
> ~200mb csv file with points:
> 
> G_realloc: out of memory (I have 4gb RAM and plenty of swap space, and
> the program never hit that limit anyway).


The vector format has a small but finite memory overhead for each
feature which makes more than several million data points impractical.

To get around this v.in.ascii (and a couple of other modules) let you
load in vector data without building topology.  (v.in.ascii -b -t)

Then it's unknown how many points you can load, but it's a lot.

Without topology, about the only thing you can do with the data is run
it through v.surf.rst.


For multi-gigabyte x,y,z datasets (or x,y,f(x,y) just as well), you can
use r.in.xyz to bin it directly into a raster map.

see:
  http://grass.ibiblio.org/grass63/manuals/html63_user/r.in.xyz.html
  http://hamish.bowman.googlepages.com/grassfiles#xyz


with regard to the vector library and LFS support, I think you can
expect some "first user" problems, Radim commented on this some time ago
in the mailing lists, have to search there for a better answer.


Hamish