VS: [mapserver-users] Mapserver search performance

[Mr. Puneet Kishor]

On May 3, 2011, at 3:36 PM, Varun saraf wrote:

> Hi Puneet,
> 
> Thanks a lot for the prompt reply. I tried using Excel 2007 and was
> not able to re-save the dbf file after editing. Also, I am having DBF
> files with about a million records and Excel tends to hang for these
> operations.


Now you tell us ;-). My sense is that most gui-based tools will choke on million+ rows. You might well want to "upgrade" to a Pg/PostGIS solution at some point, but I realize that is not what you are asking for... (also, I believe the most recent Excel versions might have lost the DBF translation capabilities -- I am not an Excel person, so I can't confirm... besides, I use Macs, and Excel is most likely hobbled on Macs anyway).


> Is there some tool other than Excel which can do these
> operations?


I remember using Perl and XBase.pm to do this. It was really very quick and trivial, but it was a long time ago. Choose your language of choice. Try R.




> 
> Thanks,
> Varun
> 
> On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 4:27 PM, Mr. Puneet Kishor <punk.kish at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> On May 3, 2011, at 3:19 PM, Varun saraf wrote:
>> 
>>> ..Is there a DBF editor out
>>> there that can be used to import the fields from any external data
>>> source into the shapefile attribute DBF without affecting the
>>> structure? I looked for a lot but they do not have the capability of
>>> doing a JOIN based on a common field and pulling data into the
>>> shapefile DBF automatically.
>> 
>> Just use MS-Excel or any program that can open up and write DBF. As long as you are careful to not change the number of rows, just add additional columns, and make sure the column names are not changed, and follow the various DBF limitations, you should be ok. Make sure to keep a backup of the original DBF in case things go ka-pow!
>> 
>> Since the DBF data and the geometry are in separate files, there is no issue with adding more attributes provide you follow the care noted above.
>> ..
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Puneet.