[postgis-devel] Distance patch

Paragon Corporation lr at pcorp.us
Sat Nov 21 10:43:59 PST 2009


Paul and Nicklas,
The patch looks good to me.  So if Nicklas is ready I would say its good to
go in.

Nicklas -- your subgeom change fixed the anomalies I started to notice (with
my neig parcel dist checks).  I tested on a wider
Distribution of geometries and they look fine.  There are a few cases (not
sure the percentage since I have to have the query run for a while just to
pick up one where the diff from old and new < 0.

In the cases where it is the diff is about e-9 (worst case)  to e-11.  So
around the range when the floating precision artifacts cloud the numbers
anyway.

Here are my test results using sample linestrings and polygons (these are
not multi though since the data that had a good mix didn't have multis) The
n-n2 range are the number of points (so testing distance between lines of
10-20 points vs. polygons of 10-20 points).  

-- (0-9, 5000 recs: new 312 ms, old 344 ms (they both fluctuate between
213ms and 625 ms so hard to tell which is faster)
-- (10-20, 5000 recs: new 344 ms, old: 750 ms)
-- (20-40, 5000 recs: new 359  ms, old: 2344 ms)
-- (41-50, 5000 recs: new 860  ms, old: 5609 ms)
-- (51-60, 5000 recs: new 1828  ms, old: 9984 ms)
-- (61-70, 5000 recs: new 1922  ms, old: 12657 ms)


Regarding the other issue that Nicklas brought up about how to test these
things.
I do find being able to run both a PostGIS 1.4 distance and PostGIS 1.5
distance in the same database very useful for testing. Its better than
defining a dist_old in postgis code because its one less thing we have to
remove and also doesn't run the risk of not being able to test old behavior
that has changed because of core code base changes.

As to whether this is useful in production to say run new PostGIS 1.5
functions you badly want and still maintain your PostGIS 1.3/1.4 -- Yes and
No.

The person in me that just wants a single feature (say faster dist or better
distance spheroid functions) from say 1.5 wihtout rocking my exisitng
installs says Yes.
The person in me that likes consistency and ease  of upgrade says No.  

So I guess we could say its possible to hack your PostGIS into a mutant
1.3/1.5 or 1.4/1.5 install but we don't support it.

Thanks,
Regina






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