On Thu, Jan 26, 2006 at 12:55:46 -0500, George Woodring <george.woodring@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I am looking for suggestions on storing and retrieving geocode > information. > > My application currently stores 2 columns (lat, long) as numeric and I > have a btree index on them. This works fine for the current set of > data, but as it expands I know it will become an issue. > > I am looking at changing the index to an rtree, but I did not know if it > is better to create a point column or if I could use the existing > lat/long columns. > > The query will always be to select points inside a box. If you don't want to use PostGIS, you could also use contrib/earthdistance. The 'earth' domain uses the cube data type to represent points on the surface of the earth (modelled as a perfect sphere). There is a GIST index available for cube, so searches should be reasonably fast.
