Dear all Concerning the benefits of having raster data stored together with vector data in a spatial database, let me first quote from an excellent paper from the late Jim Gray ("Scientific Data Management in the Coming Decade"):
"What’s wrong with files? Everything builds from files as a base. HDF uses files. Database systems use files. But, file systems have no metadata beyond a hierarchical directory structure and file names. They encourage a do-it-yourself- data-model that will not benefit from the growing suite of data analysis tools. They encourage do-it-yourself-access-methods that will not do parallel, associative, temporal, or spatial search. They also lack a high-level query language. Lastly, most file systems can manage millions of files, but by the time a file system can deal with billions of files, it has become a database system." In other words, if you have substantial amounts of raster data (as is increasingly the case in geospatial application), you will need to develop a significant amount of software to manage your files. Unless... your data is handled by a raster-enabled spatial database. Best Regards Gilberto -- =========================================== Dr.Gilberto Camara Director General National Institute for Space Research (INPE) Sao Jose dos Campos, Brazil voice: +55-12-3945-6035 fax: +55-12-3921-6455 web: http://www.dpi.inpe.br/gilberto blog: http://techne-episteme.blogspot.com/ ============================================ _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss