Serving A Large Archive an openpap-client/wms-server

[Norman Vine]

John Bonk writes:
> 
> We have a lot of data on an opendap server. We had plans for a 
> MapServer opendap-client/wms-server--in other words we wanted to build 
> a MapServer that will serve raster data from our opendap server.
> 
>   We were working on a prototype that will serve one of our products. 
> The product consists of monthly files, each file contains 2 parameters 
> per file. At present there are over 80 months (files) of data.
> 
>   I still consider myself a novice and may have some misconceptions 
> about MapServer, but my understanding is that to offer this data I will 
> need a mapfile with over 160 layers--one for each file times 2 for the 
> 2 parameters.
> 
>   I read in one of the documents 
> (http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/doc44/mapfile-reference.html) that there 
> is a 50 layer limit for a mapfile. The document said that this limit 
> could be raised by making a change to map.h. However, some of our 
> products have files containing over a hundred parameters. I estimate 
> that if we wanted to offer each of the parameters in each file for 
> several of our products, we would need a mapfile with hundreds of 
> thousands layers. Are we expecting too much from mapserver?
> 
>  Is there any way around this problem?
> 
>   Does anyone have any suggestions for serving data that is scattered 
> through thousands of files?

Hi John,

I haven't used it but Mapserver has some support for temporal REQUESTS
This might mean you only need to have 2 layers
http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/doc44/wms-time-support-howto.html

Although primarily a 1.3 WMS there is some discussion about 1.1 WMS
time support in the docs for this server
http://aes.gsfc.nasa.gov/documents/overview.html

Not exactly sure how this would be set up for UMN MapServer though

Hopefully someone more knowlegable will chime in on this

HTH

Norman