[postgis-users] rasters in PostGIS...

[Armin Burger]

I am currently using rasters together with PostGIS and Mapserver based 
on image catalogs/tileindexes. For our purposes this is a good solution 
because the images have to be accessable also via standard programs 
(like Envi, Erdas, Esri, etc) or WMS. Storing the raster data physically 
in the database would not be a direct benefit for us.

What I could see how PostGIS could be enhanced to deal with rasters are 
functions to better handle and manipulate the image catalogs, but still 
keeping the files in the file system. Eg. like some tools to 
(semi-)automatically
- create image catalogs, add images with SQL,
- reference data and metadata ,
- create pyramids/overviews,
- creation and merging of low-resolution tiles for low scale viewing
   and reference them with the full-resolution images
- extract/clip parts of an image catalog and export to various formats

In my opinion this might be related with GDAL making use of image 
catalogs that it unfortunately does not currently (the virtual rasters 
of GDAL are not so easy to handle and require yet another approach 
additionally to image catalogs), or GDAL being called by PostGIS for 
raster manipulation using SQL commands.

Just some ideas...

Armin