[postgis-users] Performance compared to large shapefiles?

[Kralidis,Tom [Burlington]]

> Jeff,
> 
> * Jeff Dege <jdege at korterra.com> [070425 16:47]:
> > Someone pointed me to PostGIS as being a tool worth considering.
> > 
> > We've done our mapping so far with various extensions built 
> on top of 
> > UMN MapServer (ka-map and openlayers).  The GIS data we've been 
> > storing in shapfiles.
> > 
> > We're finding it very difficult to manage acceptable 
> performance when 
> > working with large shapefiles, where large means >500MB, >3 million 
> > features.  We've been splitting these both by feature type (pulling 
> > the features we display at wider zooms into separate files) and by 
> > geography (tiling).  It's tedious, time-consuming, and performance 
> > still isn't what we'd wish.
> 
> PostGIS is a great tool, just for completeness: Have you 
> tested indexes on the shape files?
> http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/docs/reference/utilityreference/shptree

You could also check out shp2tile (http://swoodbridge.com/tools/).  One
option is to run shp2tile on your data, then shptree on the output
shapefiles, and then use tile4ms to create a tileindex.

..Tom