…as opposed to keeping the rasters as locally stored GEOTIFFs?
I have a large project that will require making available approximetely 50,000, 10mb GEOTIFFs as WMS to an OpenLayers based web map. Only 1 WMS will be displayed at any given time so performance is a non-issue. Considering MapServer and GeoServer for this application.
I would like to know what are the advantages and disadvantages of storing this type of data. Will updating a PostGIS database when the raster data changes be more difficult, rather than replacing a single (or series of) raster files. WMS load times drastically improved with PostGIS?
Best Answer
If all you're doing is passing rasters to end users with WMS, there is no reason to use PostGIS raster. If you need to do analysis (and more than a simple summary stats), then you may want to consider loading the rasters into PostGIS. Currently, in-db rasters are faster than out-db.