[pdal] Reading/Writing to a memory stream

[Andrew Bell]

Hi Jason,

It depends exactly what you want.  Our entwine software writes points in
LAZ format in blocks using the compressor that's part of PDAL.  However,
it's not writing straight LAZ files.  It's just writing the point data, not
the header or the VLRs, etc.  Take a look at https://github.com/
connormanning/entwine/blob/master/entwine/util/compression.cpp

We write points to databases natively, if that's what you want, but not LAZ
tiles, as such.

If you want to write the entire LAZ file to a database, I don't know that
we have anything that allows this directly.  You can certainly write a
file, mmap the file and then just do a direct copy of the memory to
whatever output source you'd like.  Most of the time, the OS won't even
flush to physical disk unless you're short memory or force it with some
flush()/sync() call, so there isn't much overhead.  Internally, the LAS/LAZ
writer uses a std::ostream, which you could theoretically carve out of heap
if you knew the size in advance (you don't, unless you want to be really
pessimistic).  LAZ typically is written in chunks of points, so the memory
can be limited, but if you want a ton of points written out without
worrying about the LAZ chunking and such, you might have to allocate a
bunch of memory.  Sometimes we do this on other formats because we have no
choice, but that may not fit with your plan.

On Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 11:14 AM, Jason Beverage <jasonbeverage at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi all!
>
> Is there any way to have PDAL read or write LAZ format from/to a memory
> stream or would the best way be to read and write to a file and then just
> load the data into memory myself.
>
> For example, say I wanted to store laz tiles in an sqlite database instead
> of on disk similar to how mbtiles works.
>
> I'm just doing some experiments now and was curious if there was any built
> in capability for this.
>
> Jason
>
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>



-- 
Andrew Bell
andrew.bell.ia at gmail.com
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