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I administer a PostGIS server that was originally intended for internal use. Then, along the way, we open up access to external institutions. Internally, I therefore created views according to the needs and users. Then for internal webmapping, mapserver allowed me to produce WFS and WMS flows. Now that we're opening up to the outside world, without much thought, we've started to share mostly WFS streams. Data is visualized using, mostly, GIS clients like QGis and Arcgis. Before continuing this deployment, I'll try to give you an update on the subject:

  • Apart from the technological question, what is better to distribute: views or WFS streams?
  • Are some better than others?
  • In which case? In short, I am interested in feedback or reflections more accomplished than mine.
MrXsquared
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Leehan
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    If you serve PostGIS views, it means your DB is exposed, possibly to the web. It means you will have to monitor and manage the users, their privileges and resource usage, deal with forgotten password and enjoy being the tech support the day the DB server change its IP or port number. With a WFS, the DB is protected and you manage the link to the DB at a single point (geoserver), but then you need to administer another server (geoserver), configure it, update it etc. – JGH Jun 22 '20 at 12:13

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For outside world WFS or WMS may be better than PostGIS because it is a more standard and common solution. But there are may perfomance issues if layers has many features, it need testing.

If data is read-only, the less complicated and more safety would be data extracts from PostGIS to GPKG, and share these .gpkg files via http.

ogr2ogr -f GPKG filename.gpkg PG:'dbname=gis host=localhost password=password'
Artem Svetlov
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