[talk-au] Running stats against GPX files ...

John Smith delta_foxtrot at yahoo.com
Thu Jun 25 13:16:08 BST 2009


--- On Thu, 25/6/09, James Livingston <doctau at mac.com> wrote:
> It all comes down to what you want to use the data for. Are
> you  
> constantly access it? Occasional access? Archival purposes?
> Read-only  
> or are you writing too?

At this stage, I personally, only have one purpose, to collect and upload to OSM, how they cope with it and store it and use it is a different matter again.

> If you're doing geospatial processing, then fixed size
> records (like  
> the 13 byte one mentioned) is good, because you can
> retrieve any node  
> by it's index. If you're archiving the data, what you care
> about is  
> how small you can get the collection of tracks (not just
> individual  
> ones).

By using deltas you can avoid compression and end up with similar sized data files, which has potentially less processing if you want to sequentially access the file, but yea, there is always a trade off, it all depends on the goals.

> I quite like XML, but *way* too many people use it when
> they really  
> shouldn't be. You need to ask yourself, do I need the
> "eXtensible" bit  
> of XML? I think anyone who blindly uses XML without
> thinking why is a  
> bit daft, but I also think that of people who will never
> use it under  
> any circumstances, even if it solves their problems.

JSON offers most of the advantages of XML, without a lot of the drawbacks, XML is often referred to as a horse designed by a committee and they ended up with a camel :)


      




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