We had this big raster that we needed to chop up into tiles and only extract a portion of for load into PostGIS. raster2pgsql doesn't currently have an option to pull just a portion of a raster and also we don't have the windows raster2pgsql compiled with MrSID support. Luckily
GDAL commandline gdal_translate has this switch that allows you to specify a chunk of a raster to grab based on a projected or unprojected box window.
We wanted to grab just that portion that is part of boston and chunk it into bite size pieces. What we needed was a grid generator similar to
what we described a while back in Map Dicing and other stuff
that would chop our neighborhood into bite sized tiles we could then use to generate the relevant gdal_translate command.
Instead of using temp tables and all that stuff, we decided to try with the ST_Tile raster function. Creating an empty raster and then tiling it.
Note the repurposing: Creating a raster with no bands to accomplish a task that has nothing to do with rasters, so that we can then apply it to something to do with rasters. Gridding is a surprisingly common step in a lot of spatial processing workflows.
Here is the SQL to do it and we'll explain in a separate article in more detail.
In a nutshell, we're using PostGIS raster technology (ST_Tile function introduced in PostGIS 2.1) that we demonstrated in Waiting for PostGIS 2.1 ST_Tile to create a grid because PostGIS geometry doesn't have cool gridding function like SpatiaLite has :).
SpatialLite tesselation. Perhaps in PostGIS 2.2
we'll see some of these SpatiaLite niceties. However ST_Tile does the trick fairly nicely and quickly. For this example took under 600 ms to generate 1524 rows of GDAL commands.
Continue reading "Chopping rasters with gdal_translate"
