Tiger Line Data

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Herman,

You do not need to and it it ill advised to combine all data into on
huge shapefile. I have all the Tiger data in one mapfile for the whole
US. There are nearly 300,000 files. See http://imaptools.com/tiger/ for
a demo of this.

The trick is to use a TILEINDEX for each layer to associate all the
files for that layer. A TILEINDEX makes it very fast to only open and
parse the files that are needed for any goven map draw. If you are
zoomed in and only need to open one small file it will be much fast than
opening one HUGE file and then scanning the whole file for objects that
might need to be draw, when 99.99% probably do not need to be drawn of
any given image.

there is a utily program called tile4ms which will help you build your
TILEINDEX. Then in the LAYER ... END block reference your TILEINDEX
instead of a DATA statement.

-Steve W.

Herman Teo wrote:
> Hi there.
> I am just getting started with mapserver. I saw that census provides a
> complete street level data of the whole united states. But the download only
> provides state-by-state layer-by-layer files. Is it possible to combine all
> layers and states for the whole us into one shp file that I can use to
> display any arbitrary location in us?
> Thanks a lot.
>
>
> Herman Teo
>