Bruno Wolff III wrote: > On Sat, Feb 03, 2007 at 14:00:26 -0500, > Mark Stosberg <mark@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> I'm using geo_distance() from contrib/earthdistance would like to find a >> way to spend up the geo distance calculation if possible. This is for a >> proximity search: "Show me adoptable pets within 250 miles of this >> zipcode". > > If you are using the "cube" based part of the earth distance package, > then you can use gist indexes to speed those searches up. Thanks for the tip. Any idea what kind of improvement I can expect to see, compared to using geo_distance()? > There are functions for creating boxes that include all of the points some distance > from a fixed point. This is lossy, so you need to recheck if you don't > want some points a bit farther away returned. Also you would need to > pick a point to be where the zip code is located, rather than using area > based zip codes. This is also interesting. Is this approach practical if I want to index what's near each of about 40,000 US zipcodes, or the approach mostly useful if you there are just a small number of fixed points to address? I'm going to start installing the cube() and earth_distance() functions today and see where I can get with the approach. Mark
