Querying & filtering raster data from PostGIS using GeoServer

Question

I'm currently working with raster data and serving it to a web application using Geoserver. I want to be able to perform queries to retrieve the raster data from a PostgreSQL database with the PostGIS extension to a web application. One of the solutions was to use the ImageMosaicJDBC plugin but I haven't been able query or filter the raster data stored in the PostGIS database from either the WMS or WCS services in Geoserver.

I want to know is there is a standard way to perform queries or filters on raster data based on WMS or WCS requests through a front end such as OpenLayers. Do I use the ImageMosaic plugin instead of the ImageMosaicJDBC? Is WCS more appropriate for these purposes?

Answer 1

The solution I arrived at was to use the ImageMosaic plugin versus the ImageMosaicJDBC plugin. The setup was simple and it allowed querying based on a number of parameters that I could setup in PostgreSQL / PostGIS. Other reasons include:

• ImageMosaic allows for more intuitive queries and less database overhead. The ImageMosaicJDBC plugin requires a pyramid structure which is not intuitive.
• The raster files are stored in their raw, original format if they're supported by the ImageMosaic plugin. ImageMosaicJDBC required a converted raster to an intermediary format in the database.
• No additional setup required both from Geoserver, since the ImageMosaic plugin is included, and by the DBMS (in my case, PostgreSQL / PostGIS) because ImageMosaic automatically creates the requires data structures.
• Increases performance because Geoserver pulls the raster data from its own directory instead of querying and downloading the raster data from the database.

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Please note that it was required for me to set preparedStatements to false in my indexer.properties file to allow cql_filter to work

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Although there are other guides out there, I used the ones provided by Geoserver,

• http://docs.geoserver.org/stable/en/user/tutorials/imagemosaic_timeseries/imagemosaic_timeseries.html
• http://docs.geoserver.org/stable/en/user/tutorials/imagemosaic_timeseries/imagemosaic_time-elevationseries.html

Here are additional references that helped me with this solution,

• https://geoserver.geo-solutions.it/edu/en/multidim/mosaic_config/netcdf_mosaic.html
• http://docs.geoserver.org/latest/en/user/data/raster/imagemosaic/index.html