[postgis-devel] Death to Pointless Operators

[Mark Cave-Ayland]

Paragon Corporation wrote:

> Mark,
> Are you saying you want  people to define an index before hand and have the
> index determine how the operation behaves?  What if there is no index? What
> then.

No, I was suggesting that we leave the existing index code in place and 
add a second operator class so that the user can specify at build time 
which type of index they want, e.g. based on contrib/cube:

CREATE OPERATOR CLASS gist_geometry_nd_ops
	DFOR TYPE geometry USING gist AS
         OPERATOR        3       && ,
         OPERATOR        6       = ,
         OPERATOR        7       @> ,
         OPERATOR        8       <@ ,
         OPERATOR        13      @ ,
         OPERATOR        14      ~ ,
         FUNCTION        1       geometry_nd_consistent (internal, cube, 
int, oid, internal),
         FUNCTION        2       geometry_nd_union (internal, internal),
         FUNCTION        3       geometry_nd_compress (internal),
         FUNCTION        4       geometry_nd_decompress (internal),
         FUNCTION        5       geometry_nd_penalty (internal, 
internal, internal),
         FUNCTION        6       geometry_nd_picksplit (internal, internal),
         FUNCTION        7       geometry_nd_same (cube, cube, internal);

This gives a greatly reduced set of operators for multi-dimensional 
indices, and allows the user to build a multi-dimensional index using 
something like:

CREATE INDEX foo ON bar USING gist (baz gist_geometry_nd_ops);

> Also the thought that ST_Intersects may return a different answer if I have
> a 2D vs.  3D index in place is even more disturbing. 

That's a different issue though, no? I thought the plan was to follow 
the ISO/MM spec convention of adding a 3D suffix to the function name if 
it was 3D, e.g. you would use ST_Intersect3D() if you wanted a 3D 
intersection? Otherwise we should stick to 2D.


ATB,

Mark.

-- 
Mark Cave-Ayland - Senior Technical Architect
PostgreSQL - PostGIS
Sirius Corporation plc - control through freedom
http://www.siriusit.co.uk
t: +44 870 608 0063

Sirius Labs: http://www.siriusit.co.uk/labs