Raster tile indexing in PostGIS

[Thy, Kristian]

Quoting the Raster Data Access HOWTO
<http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/docs/howto/raster_data>:

"The list of files forming a layer can be stored in a shapefile with
polygons
 representing the footprint of each file, and the name of the files.
This is
 called a TILEINDEX ..."

The tileindex, we're told, is defined in the map file like this:

LAYER
  NAME "hpool"
  STATUS ON
  TILEINDEX "hp2.shp"
  TILEITEM "Location"
  TYPE RASTER
END

My question is then: Is it possible (and if yes, desirable) to read the
tileindex from a PostGIS data source instead of a shapefile - i.e. use
gdatindex to create the tileindex, then convert the index .shp using
shp2pgsql and stuff it into PostGIS. My understanding is that using
plain ole shapefiles you miss out on the gist indexing and thus suffer
a performance loss.

best regards,
Kristian Thy


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