"best" data format for attribute searches

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Bart van den Eijnden wrote:
> Hi list,
> 
> AFAIK Mapserver does not use the Mapinfo attribute indexes.
> 
> I am trying to perform attribute searches on a 25 Mb Mapinfo file and
> am worried about performance, since the indexes won't be used which
> will mean scanning the whole data file for every attribute search.
> 
> What would be a wise format to shift to for this type of operation?
> Or doesn't it make any sense to shift to eg PostGIS because of the
> way Mapserver does queries to RDBMS's?

Bart,

PostGIS works wonderfully. Fully indexed searches (if you have the 
indexes), and you can do joins to classify data on rendering, and it has 
spatial indexes which speed up rendering like tileindexes do for shape 
data. I have been very happy with it. Oh and you can keep some data in 
.tab files and some in postGIS if you wish to easy migration.

-Steve W.

> Thanks in advance for any insight on this.
> 
> Btw the data is polygon data.
> 
> Best regards, Bart
> 
> Bart van den Eijnden Syncera IT Solutions Postbus 270 2600 AG  DELFT
> 
> tel.nr.: 015-7512436 email: BEN at Syncera-ITSolutions.nl
>