Spatial Galaxy

I’ve come to the conclusion that storing rasters in a database is of dubious value, particularly from a data warehouse perspective.

If you manage a collection of rasters that are updated on a frequent basis, storing them in a relational database with ArcSDE quickly becomes a pain. I’m not talking about a dozen or so rasters, but rather tens of thousands. The overhead of the database and middleware just doesn’t seem to be worth it.

A better solution is to use MapServer with a tile index (created using gdaltindex) to serve them to your desktop clients via WMS. Fast, simple, and easy to update and manage.

Marco Hugentobler at the Institute of Cartography, ETH Zurich has announced the QGIS MapServer project.

From the website:
“QGIS mapserver is a server module for geographic maps. The content of vector and raster datasources (e.g. shapefiles, gml, postgis, wfs, geotiff ) is visualized according to the request parameters. The generated map image is sent back to the client over the internet.”

This project is very much in the early stages, as it requires a specific development version of QGIS. There is a Windows binary available for download as well as packages for Ubuntu (make sure to read the caveat).

You can also view a sample map request that displays the countries of Europe.