GeoArrays.read(ga, masked=false) should probably be default

[alex-s-gardner]

In all of my workflows I need to set masked=false when using GeoArrays.read otherwise I get really slow read times. Also masked=false results in a change in Type as missings are added. For this reason I think masked=false should be set as the default

[evetion]

Could you specify how much slower? And are you only accessing a smaller part of a larger raster? Because masked=false is lazy and will only load into memory on the getindex later on, so initial load is fast, but accessing values is slower.

Also, there's an open issue #108 for handling masked/nodata values in masked=false, because now you need to handle those yourself.

Once I fixed that issue, I agree that everything could be lazy by default.

[alex-s-gardner]

@evetion I'm working with subsets drawn from global .vrts, when masked=true the process slows by multiple orders of magnitude. Every once and awhile I forget to include masked=false and the pipeline comes to a halt.

[evetion]

That sounds familiar indeed. How do you handle nodata/missing values in that use case? Or do you have a separate mask vrt?

[alex-s-gardner]

It's depends a bit, sometimes I leave the no data value in the data and work with it that way... sometimes I fill the no_data value with NAN's after subsetting