[postgis-users] Multipoint with Characteristics

[Howard Butler]

On Jul 27, 2009, at 11:35 AM, Kevin Ridge wrote:

> Hello,
> I am new to postgis and was wondering how to solve the following  
> issue.
>
> Lets say i have a million points each of which has a color defined.  
> Is there a way to represent this using multipoint? I am currently  
> using a point but each point has its own record which makes  
> inserting and calculating intersections very time consuming.
>
> Is there any efficient way of doing this instead of making a million  
> rows?


/me sells Paul's services.

Not really.  You want what paul calls a "point patch" or Oracle calls  
a point cloud. Something like <http://opengeo.org/services/coredevelopment/postgis/pointclouds/ 
 >.

I have quite a bit of experience with Oracle's point cloud stuff as  
well (and linking libLAS to use it).  They basically store blobs (with  
indexing that points to *which* blob to fetch) and expect that  
applications other than their simple query stuff can interpret them.   
With both databases, storing point clouds in a way that they are very  
useful without a lot of application support is kind of sketchy.