MySQL access and joins

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Kralidis,Tom [Burlington] wrote:
>>>Will simple MySQL tables work as the join table?  I believe 
>>>--with-mygis will work on a non-sppatial DB
>>
>>Yes, but this will work ONLY for template based queries (this 
>>is not a mygis 
>>limitiation per se, MapServer has separate code for the template (or 
>>mapscript) queries, and join functionality you might wish to 
>>use in a .MAP 
>>file).
>>
> 
> 
> Thanks for the info.  What do you mean by template based queries?  My
> overall goal is to generate a map (with shp2img) whose mapfile defines a
> layer which has a join btw a shapefile and MySQL table, and CLASS items
> based on expressions in columns in the MySQL table.
> 
> Thanks for any advice and / or recommendation.

Hi Tom,

If you are trying to do thematic mapping with the JOIN it will not work 
unless you put your geometry and your join attributes into PostGIS. I 
recently gave up hope that it might be added to mapserver and moved some 
data into PostGIS and boy am I happy I did. There is a little bit of a 
learning curve, but it was not nearly as bad as I thought in might be 
and I am totally sold on postgres/postGIS and mapserver.

Check out 
http://imaptools.com/~woodbri/thematic/thematic.cgi?name=ThemeMap&cmd=Map&debug=&location=MA&method=natural&numclasses=10&demographic=DP30085

-Steve W.