Speeding up load time for huge SHP files

[Sebastian Walter]

Hi,

Jan Hartmann wrote:
>
> How would you produce that simplified version is none is available
> already?

A very conveniant way of simplifying big shapefiles is dumping them in
PostGis/Postgresql using shape2pgsql, then creating a new geometry
column and fill the data with "UPDATE <table> SET <newcolumn> =
simplify(the_geom,0.01)
where the 0.01 is the tolerance factor, this number works well for me in
longlat units. Then you can dump the table back to a shapefile using
pgsql2shp.

This way, simplifying huge shapefiles is really fast and stable, while
in ArcGIS it's taking hours, and then just crashes.

Regards,
Sebastian