The new MRR file format is an enabling technology which offers the following key benefits:
- Extremely large raster/grid datasets - The MRR format has been designed to address the difficulty of handling extremely large datasets. It supports a wide variety of data types, and provides industry standard compression techniques and predictive encoding techniques. The MRR format minimizes storage requirements and provides efficient data access to extremely large raster files. It has been designed to deliver an enhanced visualization experience by maintaining an overview data pyramid. This guarantees efficient data visualization at any scale.
- Unified data - The MRR format is capable of storing all types of raster/grid data in common use. MRR unifies raster data types by allowing storage of any of the four fundamental ‘field’ types – Image, Image Palette, Classified (thematic) and Continuous. An MRR can efficiently store imagery as either continuous color values or as color indices linked to a palette. It can store continuous data such as spectral imagery or gridded data like elevation. It can efficiently handle hyper-spectral imagery containing hundreds of bands of spectral data. It can also store classified data where each cell is linked to a flexible table of data.
- Sparse data - Sometimes raster datasets can be extremely large but only sparsely populated with valid data. An example of such a dataset is a LiDAR survey which follows along a pipeline for several 100 km but is only 100 m wide. In cases such as these, the MRR format does not store values for the regions containing no data, but still remains flexible enough to add additional data to the source file. This allows extremely sparse datasets to be stored efficiently on disk, be rapidly accessed and easily updated.
- Efficient memory management - The MapInfo Pro Advanced Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) provide intelligent data caching which automatically manage the use of system memory for the user. This automatic caching system simplifies the programmer’s tasks when working with extremely large datasets.
- Efficient storage - Efficient storage is a pre-requisite technology for large raster files. MRR provides a variety of techniques that users can employ to minimize storage requirements. These include sparse storage, flexible data type support, data transformations, control over decimal precision, predictive encoding and a variety of industry standard compression techniques encompassing lossless and lossy encoders.