[mapserver-users] Speed of PostGIS vs Shapefiles in MapServer 5.4

[Gregor at HostGIS]

> Most of them are not overly complex or large, is there still significant 
> benefit to using them from shapefiles, or is it becoming a more closely 
> run race between sources.

It's impossible to say for sure, based on the nuances of your use case. 
But in my experience PostGIS is at least as fast as shapefiles. It 
supports indexing and smarter data-seeking than a flat file can, and 
lays the blocks on disk and caches them in memory better than a flat 
file can.

Of course, when it comes to updates and deletions and other such 
accesses, writing a Python-OGR program to update a shapefile is far less 
pleasant than using any ol' DBI you like too!

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Greg Allensworth - SysAdmin, Programmer, GIS Person, Security
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