[postgis-users] Method to remove overlaps in a layer

[Pierre Racine]

Hi all,

Anybody know a well documented and efficient method to remove overlaps in a polygon table using PostGIS? 

I can think of two cases:

a) I may want to do it  on a single table containing overlaps.

b) I may want to do it because I want to update a clean (non-overlapping) table with a new one of smaller extent.

In both cases I would like to be able to define/use a best polygon selection strategy (based on a year attribute for example).

A small detail: I want to do this on a table containing 26 000 000 polygons...

Thanks for any input,

Pierre