Just comment on mentioned comparison of ArcGIS / QGIS / Mapinfo - kth.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:729183/FULLTEXT01.pdf . The evaluation schema says you can't move labels in QGIS (oh yes you can), you don't have conflict detection (oh yes you have, though not perfect, but definitely works better than in Mapinfo which is checked), you don't have free placement of legend items - you can easily have freely positioned legend for every item you need.

And lastly it says you don't have choice for north arrow - ofcourse you have. Mmm, wondering how hard she tried to find these things up...

Hi All, I'm trying to get a feel for when it is best to use a spatial database as opposed to system files for storing, analyzing, and manipulating spatial data. I do a lot of scientific analyses and such, which often requires some early data processing first. Would people typically bring all data for a project into a spatial database and work from there? Or what types of workflows to folks use? (I'm particularly interested in FOSS-based workflows)

@mtreg personnally I use system files for storing raster data (always), system files (csv) or database for storing tables (I use various softwares, and I find it easier to use csv as interchange files and store the data in memory for processing, even if I'm sure that a better knowledge of database would reduce my use of csv's, for vector GIS, I use database.

Thanks @radouxju - that's largely how I've been working, but it seems like being able to track what you've done might be easiest doing data management in a spatial database. Plus, some operations are pretty fluid using Spatial extensions of SQL (e.g., retrieving counts of specific pixel values within individual polygons using PostGIS)

@mtreg I don't know a database that can handle large (>250 Gb) raster properly.

@radouxju Okay - good to know. Thankfully my biggest files currently are ~30 Gb rasters... though when I loaded it into PostGIS and it got split into tiles, I had some alignment issues I still need to go back and troubleshoot. Maybe size had something to do with it.