[postgis-users] Fun with GiST and Postgis

[Andy Turk]

Just for "fun", I loaded up the entire street segment layer from the 
Tiger/2000 database into Postgis/Postgres this weekend. It took a several 
hours to import all the data (which had been massaged beforehand).

The resulting table is a little north of 31 million rows. It took 5 hours to 
create a geometry index on our 500 MHz Xeon server. To be honest, it was a 
nerve wracking 5 hours because I didn't know whether to expect it to take 
linearlly longer than my previous 2M row dataset, or quadratically longer. I 
was also concerned that something might break with an index that size. But it 
seems to work just fine.

Queries using the index are pretty snappy although we haven't really started 
pushing Postgres' buffer cache yet. This machine has 4G of RAM with 1G 
allocated to shared buffers.

Heh. How much would an Oracle license would be for a 4 CPU server with Oracle 
Spatial tacked on for good measure? ;-)

Andy