Indexed Shapefile vs. PostGIS

[Schuyler Erle]

* On 24-Aug-2005 at  1:25PM PDT, Rob McCulley said:
> 
> 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.

My experience is that PostGIS is slower for operations like that,
because of the way it has to traverse the index. I recommend using
Steve Woodbridge's shp2tile with the -q option -- it'll take you about
five minutes to get working -- and then create a tile index.

PostGIS is great if you need to do indexed spatial operations, but if
you're just showing vectors on a map based on their locations, I think
Shapefiles on disk are faster *if* there aren't too many shapes per
file.

SDE