In this chapter, we looked at how we can increase the formats supported by GeoServer by implementing the GDAL plugin. To do this, we have to install the GDAL binaries and ensure that our environment is appropriately configured so that GeoServer is aware of it.

We looked at how important it is to consider the raster data that we want to serve through GeoServer, and learned how we can use gdalinfo to inspect our raster files to learn more about their structure. Having understood the structure of our raster images, we looked at strategies to manipulate them so that they are optimized; this included considering whether they should be merged to create larger single files. Other strategies to optimize our raster data included adding overviews and ensuring that the image data is organized internally as tiles. We saw how gdaladdo can be used to manage overviews and learned about the format creation options to control tiled-image data structures. We looked at how the ImageMosaic format can...