One Gigabyte per Survey, of Which 108 KB Goes in the Database

Here is the disk layout of one mobile mapping survey — a vehicle with a LiDAR scanner and a panoramic camera, driven along a road: data/001_MMS/ 507 MB point cloud orbit/oblak/ 566 MB spherical photos trajectory/*.gpkg 108 KB the path the vehicle drove Just over a gigabyte. The database this feeds holds 2.3 GB in total — for 2.7 million road features across a hundred layers. Two more surveys and the binary data outweighs everything the database has ever stored. So the question isn't how to put a point cloud in Postgres. It's what you put in Postgres instead . The trajectory is the index Of that gigabyte, one file goes into the database: the 108 KB trajectory, a GeoPackage holding the line the vehicle drove. That line is what makes the survey findable. It draws on the map with everything else. You can ask which surveys cover a junction, which are newest, whether a stretch of road has been captured since the resurfacing. All the questions people actually ask are questions about where and when , and the trajectory answers every one of them at 0.01% of the storage. The heavy files never enter the database. The row holds paths: class Cloud ( models . Model ): name = models . CharField ( max_length = 120 , db_index = True ) path_name = models . CharField ( max_length = 120 ) # -> octree metadata JSON orbit_url = models . CharField ( max_length = 255 ) # -> spherical photo index spherical_photo = models . BooleanField ( default = False ) recording_date = models . DateField ( null = True ) source_srid = models . IntegerField ( null = True , choices = SOURCE_SRID_CHOICES ) available = models . BooleanField ( default = True ) Metadata, geometry, and pointers. That's the whole trick, and it isn't clever — it's just the discipline to not reach for a bytea column. Why not in the database Postgres will happily store a gigabyte. It's the access pattern that kills you. A browser point cloud viewer doesn't fetch a point cloud. It fetches an octree : a tree of small files, and as the