Indexed Shapefile vs. PostGIS

Rob McCulley RMcCulley at COUNTY24.COM
Wed Aug 24 16:14:26 EDT 2005


I have a polygon layer with about a million polygons.  The maxscale of the layer will be such that only about two dozen of the polygons will be visible at any one time.  I'm trying to decide on the best method to store this data.  What will be more efficient?

- Have the polygon layer split into smaller shapefiles and then use an index file.

- Have the polygon layer in a single table in PostGIS.

I'm leaning towards the index file setup, but if any of you have experience with large datasets in PostGIS, will it perform as well as using index shapefile?  It will take a lot less work on my part if I can simply import the shapefile into PostGIS.

Thanks,
Rob McCulley



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