Raster tile indexing in PostGIS

[Thy, Kristian]

From: percy [percyd at pdx.edu] 
> 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.

From: Fawcett, David [David.Fawcett at state.mn.us]
> If you are looking for performance, I am guessing that you can
> do better with spatially-indexed shapefiles.  Have you created
> quadtree indexes for your tileindex shapefile?  Take a look at
> shptree:
http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/docs/reference/utilityreference/shptree

Oh my.

Is this the general consensus? I.e. if I'm just using MapServer
for displaying data and not using any of the spatial query
stuff from PostGIS, I'm better off (performance-wise) with plain
old shapefiles?

And if so, is the fact that ArcSDE is seemingly faster than
plain old shapefiles just another ESRI license selling
point to get people to shell out money for SDE? ;-)

If yes, it's going to be hard to convince my bosses that we don't
need the database, but I'll try :-)

best regards,
Kristian


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