[postgis-devel] Exclusion Constraints in PostgreSQL 8.5

[Jeff Davis]

Exclusion Constraints was just committed to PostgreSQL:

http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql.git;a=commit;h=49116e729dffb1b1c60cd837e9e6930cb4d31690

I developed this feature for temporal data management (temporal keys,
specifically), but it will work with geometric/geographic data as well.

The most obvious use case regarding PostGIS would be to prevent
overlapping geometries from existing in the same table. However, the
operators all seem to be based on the bounding boxes of the geometries,
not the geometries themselves.

Is there a reason the operators don't use RECHECK? If they did use
RECHECK, PostGIS would work very nicely with Exclusion Constraints right
now. Is PostGIS interested in supporting a set of operators that can be
used with Exclusion Constraints?

Regards,
	Jeff Davis