Raster tile indexing in PostGIS

[percy]

Kristian,

My understanding is that shapefiles with a spatial index (qix, generated
with the shptree utility in mapserver) are actually faster than postgis
access to the same data. I've had excellent performance with shapefiles 
for the display side of things, and PostGIS for the querying capabilities.
Percy

Thy, Kristian wrote:
> 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
>   
-- 
David Percy
Geospatial Data Manager
Geology Department
Portland State University
http://gisgeek.pdx.edu
503-725-3373