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Does writing to a MapInfo Extended TAB format take longer than to a MapInfo TAB ?

R
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Does writing to a MapInfo Extended TAB format take longer than to a MapInfo TAB ? Just wanted to check with the community if this is a known/expected behaviour with writing data to MapInfo Extended TAB and also if there are workarounds to quicken the writing process.

Although I have experienced FME 2017 take considerably longer time to write a MapInfo Extended TAB for polygon data that is about 1.2 million in count, I failed to take note of the actual time it took, from the log. I do have a stat for a much smaller dataset, that of 1500 polygons and it took about 14 minutes to write to a MapInfo Extended TAB

siennaatsafe
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6 replies

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  • lenaatsafe
  • November 1, 2017

Hi @raghunaren

yes, you are absolutely correct, writing with MapInfo Extended TAB usually takes longer than with MapInfo TAB Writers. If MAPINFO or MITAB is sufficient for your project, please use one of these writers for now. If MapInfo Extended TAB provides you with functionality not supported by old MapInfo Writers, you will see an increase in processing (writing) time. We are monitoring performance closely and will try to improve MapInfo Extended TAB Writer performance (if it is technically possible).

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  • raghunaren
  • Author
  • November 2, 2017

Thank you. Looking forward to this :)

J
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lenaatsafe wrote:

Hi @raghunaren

yes, you are absolutely correct, writing with MapInfo Extended TAB usually takes longer than with MapInfo TAB Writers. If MAPINFO or MITAB is sufficient for your project, please use one of these writers for now. If MapInfo Extended TAB provides you with functionality not supported by old MapInfo Writers, you will see an increase in processing (writing) time. We are monitoring performance closely and will try to improve MapInfo Extended TAB Writer performance (if it is technically possible).

Hey @LenaAtSafe ,

 

 

Just wondering if there is any progress on this, I have 4mil features which are taking 28 hours to write a 9gb file. I have put these same features into a SpatialLiteDB in under an hour!

 

I have then converted this in MapInfo to NativeX which takes another hour (it has memory issues though which i have contacted PB about file was 103gb from a 2gb database).

 

 

Cheers,

 

 

James
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  • raghunaren
  • Author
  • December 28, 2020
lenaatsafe wrote:

Hi @raghunaren

yes, you are absolutely correct, writing with MapInfo Extended TAB usually takes longer than with MapInfo TAB Writers. If MAPINFO or MITAB is sufficient for your project, please use one of these writers for now. If MapInfo Extended TAB provides you with functionality not supported by old MapInfo Writers, you will see an increase in processing (writing) time. We are monitoring performance closely and will try to improve MapInfo Extended TAB Writer performance (if it is technically possible).

Hi @lenaatsafe​ , do you happen to have any update on the performance while trying to write MapInfo Extended TAB in FME.

What I also experience is the size of extended tabs are inflated while writing through FME but with JFAL library the size is 1.5 times lesser.

M
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  • markatsafe
  • December 31, 2020

@raghunaren​ Sorry - there have been no changes here. As of 2020 we're still constrained by the API we have to use to support the extended TAB.

sigher
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  • sigherContributor
  • Contributor
  • February 4, 2025

Any news regarding this? Still extremely slow on FME 2025. It seems that the ogr2ogr is fast though - and I thought that FME used gdal/ogr2ogr under the hood so it should be as fast?

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