It would be possible to put a trigger on your table that took the float columns 
and created a point or line geometry out of them, and updated a geometry column 
in your database, every time a row was inserted or updated. Then you could do 
all the geometric operations you want, even spatial indexing, without really 
having to worry about the non-standard sql portion of the database (other than 
writing the initial trigger function).

HTH.
Chris

Quoting Wood Brent <pcreso@pcreso.com>:

> 
> 
> Any advice???
> 
> We are looking to store data with a geographic component in Postgres. We want
> to use generic SQL so the data loading scripts are as platform independent as
> we can get.
> 
> I'd like to use PostGIS/GEOS functionality to provide spatial query
> functionality.
> 
> Is it possible to create a view using data stored as floats to cast them as
> geometric types? (Obviously there will not be any spatial indexing)
> 
> Something like
> "create view ...as select ..., line(point(startx, starty),point(endx,
> endy))..."
> where start/end x/y are floats.
> 
> 
> Even without the indexes, select by intersect, distance, etc would be nice to
> have. I know this is possible with the Postgres internal spatial datatypes,
> but
> I don't know about GEOS/Postgis.
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
>   Brent Wood
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