Application Data

[Brent Wood]

>
> I would like to know, if it is possible to convert data produced from
> a third party application to a shapefile or PostGIS table.

In a nutshell, yes it is possible. Basic shell scripts, perl or awk can all be
used to reformat such data to a format which can be loaded into PostGIS.

>
> Hypothetically speaking, the data from the third party application
> will be in the following format.
>
> SSN, Lat, Long, Age etc

eg, along the lines of:

cat <your_file> | awk "(<write out the reformatted data>)" | psql <database> -c
"copy <table> from STDIN [with delimiter];"


There are many ways of getting the data into PostGIS. This is a shell based
Linux/UNIX approaches, but it can be done under Windows if you use that, with
something like Cygwin.

>
> Imagine that the above data is huge (as large as 100GB), so I need to
> dump this information to a database.

Using that many records in a single table may not be optimal for performance,
so breaking it up into subsets based on some sort of sensible categories is
probably worth looking into. Even for the loading process it may be worth
processing subsets, one at a time. But performance issues aside, if you have
the disk space it should work.

>
> I would like to know, how to use this data from a table to Map it onto
> a MAPServer.

I suggest you focus on one issue at a time, starting with how to load the data.
Then how to query it with SQL, & then via other applications such as Mapserver.
Taking things in a logical sequence, instead of everything at once, may make it
easier to understand.

Brent Wood