[postgis-devel] Optimizing contains/within

Robert W. Burgholzer rburghol at vt.edu
Fri Jul 27 07:18:22 PDT 2007


Chris/others,
Can't you simply use function overloading, such as the following (don't know if
geometry[] is really the proper way to indicate and array of geometries):

CREATE FUNCTION contains(geometry[],geometry[])
   RETURNS boolean
   AS 'C:/Program Files/PostgreSQL/8.2/lib/liblwgeom.dll'
   LANGUAGE 'C' IMMUTABLE STRICT; -- WITH (isstrict,iscachable);

to avoid the confusion that would arise from having to create a separate
function like "points_in_polys"?

r.b.

> Chris Hodgson wrote:
<snip>
> > Even if geos had a "batch optimized" function like "points_in_ring()"
> > that was designed to use the more optimized strategy, it would be
> > impossible to use it because your SQL query would likely look something
> > like:
> >
> > SELECT point_in_poly(a.geom_column, b.geom_column) from a join b;
> >
> > and so the SQL plan would be to call point_in_poly() many times, not
> > points_in_poly().
> >
> > I think there are two solutions to this problem. The possibly simpler
> > but less generic solution would be to create some new functions in geos
> > and postgis that are designed to work on arrays/lists/sets of objects,
> > so that you could use SQL like this:
> >
> > SELECT points_in_polys( (select geom_col from a), (select geom_col from
> > b) )
> >
> > And be returned an array of results. This would provide a more optimized


--
Robert W. Burgholzer
--
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