Application Data

[Ethan Alpert]

True it's going to be big in postgis but there is the advantage that you
can spatially index it.

Also He doesn't mention if the data is in ASCII in which case converting
to a binary representation in a shapefile might take up less space.

Just my two cents.



-e

-----Original Message-----
From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU] On
Behalf Of Frank Warmerdam
Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2005 3:52 PM
To: MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU
Subject: Re: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] Application Data


On Thu, 17 Mar 2005 17:41:24 -0500, Giridhar Manepalli
<gmanepal at gmail.com> wrote:
> I would like to know, if it is possible to convert data produced from 
> a third party application to a shapefile or PostGIS table.
>
> Hypothetically speaking, the data from the third party application 
> will be in the following format.
>
> SSN, Lat, Long, Age etc
>
> Imagine that the above data is huge (as large as 100GB), so I need to 
> dump this information to a database.
>
> I would like to know, how to use this data from a table to Map it onto

> a MAPServer.
>
> and process queries like:
>
> *.)  How many people are at a given location

Giridhar,

It is certainly possible in principle to translate this data to PostGIS
or into a point shapefile, but if it is 100GB of data in that compact
comma seperated value format, it is going to be alot larger in PostGIS
or in a shapefile.

A traditional approach to handling this sort of dataset, if you only
need summary information is to aggregate it somehow. Otherwise you are
going to have alot of performance and query optimization issues.

Good luck,
--
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam,
warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent