[Mapserver-dev] virtualising attribute data

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Daniel Morissette wrote:

> Attila Csipa wrote:
> 
>> I was thinking about the possibilities of virtualising attribute data 
>> for my needs, meaning that for example a layer that has spatial data 
>> in a shapefile has the attribute data in plain mysql (this is how it 
>> works in my prototype test and happens to be the most requested 
>> feature that I got). Note that this is _not_ the same as doing a join 
>> and not like using virtualspatialogr. 
> 
> 
> Have you thought about using an OGR SQL join? I think that would do 
> exactly what you need. Look for JOIN in 
> http://ogr.maptools.org/ogr_sql.html
> 
> I don't think OGR supports MySQL directly (maybe it does?), but you 
> could connect to MySQL or most other databases through OGR's ODBC driver.

I for one would like to see a virtualised attribute capability in 
mapserver because:

1) setting up ODBC drivers are a real pain on Linux
2) currently joins are not supported on rendering
3) I have 100 GB of Census Summary file data in MySQL and would like to 
render thematic maps of Tiger data in shapefiles
4) The prospect of learning PostGIS/postgre and moving all the Census 
data and all the Tiger data to PostGIS just seems like an overwhelming 
and time consuming task given all the other things I would like to be doing.

OK, so I'm probably not in the main stream, but I think that this would 
be a good feature that other would use if it is available.

-Steve W.
  http://imaptools.com