Re: inserting 4800 records at a time

>> We use an application that generates 4800 points for the graph of a waveform.
>> We capture this data and display it to the user. Now we want to save all this
>> information to a database. I have tried to create a record for each point,
>> but insertion/retrieval is slow. I thought that maybe I could save one record
>> per graph and save all the points as a large string, but there would be 148k
>> characters in the string. Then I'm still not sure what the performance would
>> be like. Would the use of BLOBs a better way to go here? Any ideas on what
>> the best approach would be for us?
>>

I strongly recommend the use of PostGIS for storing (and
managing/querying) point
geometries in PostGIS.

If you do take this approach there are several advantages, not least the
large number of
supporting applications.

For example, OGR now supports GMT (in SVN right now), so you can plot
your spatial &
timeseriesdata from the command line with data driven scripts, a
simplistic example:


LIST=`psql $DB -A -t -c "select distinct species from table;"`

for SPP in $LIST ; do
   ogr2ogr -f "GMT" -nln data.gmt data PG:dbname=db -sql "select pont,
catch from table where species = '$SPP';"

   psxy data.gmt -R -JM ... > ${SPP}.ps
done

this approach allows maps/plots to be generated automagically from the
data, as GMT is a commandline package for
plotting data & ogr2pgr can generate GMT format data from a PostGIS table...



As far as loading is concerned, are you loading as separate inserts or
using copy?

A bulk load via copy is generally much faster.



Cheers,

   Brent Wood