Advise wanted: Mapserver 4 and MS/SQL

[Lars V. Nielsen]

I'm building an app with Mapserver, that needs to thmatically visualize
circa 51000 km suare cells covering Denmark.

Each cell needs to be colored differently (max. 10 colors), and need to
display a count as a label in each cell's center.

The map layer is a MapInfo table with a cell ID as first text column.

Unfortunately the color and count info is stored on a Microsft SQL Server
without any spatial capabilities whatsoever.

What is the best way to tackle this problem ? All suggestions are welcome.

What I can't do (have tried) is programmatically set the class expression to
filter the IDs. If the expression states more than 100 IDs, Mapserver
refuses.

What I would rather not do, is issue 51000 queries to fetch the color and
count info for each cell seperately.

Mapserver displays the 51000 cells in 2 seconds if the color coding is an
attribute in the table, but the specific color+count changes per definition
for each user hit, so I can't use static map layer attribute content.

Please advise.

Using: PHP 4.3.2 and MapScript 4.0 on Windows 2000

Best regards
Lars V. Nielsen
GisPro