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Mosaic Dataset, Raster Catalog or Raster Dataset?

808707

Hello,

I havn't worked with amy of these for a while and was wondering if someone could recommend the best format for tiling together separate aerial photographs?

Also if someone could tell me the order that they were introduced by ESRI it might help me to decide which to use.

Many thanks for any help 🙂

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jskinner

Mosaic Datasets were introduced at 10.0 and is the latest and greatest. A mosaic dataset will save you time and storage, perform the fastest, and also has the benefits of on-the-fly processing.

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BruceLang

Jake Skinner wrote:
I haven't seen any customers delete the initial imagery after loading the data into a raster catalog or raster dataset. In my opinion, this won't be a good practice.

Your reply contains some good information - thanks.

I didn't mean to imply my one and only copy of the original imagery would be deleted. That would be bad!

For the raster catalog, I would; (1) copy the uncompressed images from a USB backup drive to the server, (2) load the images into the catalog, (3) verify the results, (4) delete the uncompressed images.

That way, the uncompressed images are not taking up disk space (as they would for a mosaic dataset) and the raster catalog contains the images in a compressed form thereby saving space.

jskinner

Hi Bruce,

I haven't seen any customers delete the initial imagery after loading the data into a raster catalog or raster dataset. In my opinion, this won't be a good practice.

The mosaic dataset will perform MUCH faster than a raster catalog with this many images. This is due to the mosaic dataset's Overviews.

Take a look at this helpful thread.

BruceLang

Jake Skinner wrote:
Mosaic Datasets were introduced at 10.0 and is the latest and greatest. A mosaic dataset will save you time and storage, perform the fastest, and also has the benefits of on-the-fly processing.

I'm also wondering if I should use a raster catalog or mosaic dataset. What I'm not understanding is how can Mosaic datasets save storage if only "pointers" to the images are stored?

I have approx 12000 TIF aerial images about 365GB in size. For a mosaic dataset then, It seems these images must be permanently stored in a folder (on the server) at zero compression. Where as, a "managed" raster catalog can load the images, using compression, then once loaded the "images folder" can be removed saving a lot of storage.

BTW This data will be stored in an Enterprise Geodatabase using SQL Server 2012

Please educate me! Thanks in advance.

808707

Mosaic Datasets were introduced at 10.0 and is the latest and greatest. A mosaic dataset will save you time and storage, perform the fastest, and also has the benefits of on-the-fly processing.

Great thanks for the help JSkinn 🙂

jskinner

Mosaic Datasets were introduced at 10.0 and is the latest and greatest. A mosaic dataset will save you time and storage, perform the fastest, and also has the benefits of on-the-fly processing.

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