[postgis-users] advice for quicker display?

[Stephen Woodbridge]

On 2/14/2012 1:57 PM, Bistrais, Bob wrote:
> As some of you already know, I’m a newbie to PostGIS and have just
> barely got a test PostGIS database up and running. So, my latest
> question is in regards to draw times. I created a statewide parcel layer
> from a shapefile. At statewide scale, when the application loads, the
> parcel data draws far slower than the original shapefile did. How can I
> tune this so that draw times are better?

If you are drawing all the data, it will always be slower than 
shapefiles. The trick is to not draw more than is reasonable at a given 
scale. So the answer is don't try to draw all the parcels for the whole 
state. As you zoom in and need to only draw a subset of the parcels, you 
will start to get speed advantages by using the spatial (GIST) indexes 
in postgis.

create index mytable_the_geom_gidx on mytable using gist (the_geom);

-Steve W