Re: Radial searches of cartesian points?

Hi,

On Jan 5, 2012, at 12:54 PM, Merlin Moncure wrote:

> see:
> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/interactive/cube.html
>
> and pay special attention to gist indexing portions. cube only
> indexes box operations, but you can cull the sphere using 3d distance
> formula for points between inner and outer bounding cube.

Thanks for the pointer, Merlin. I had been looking at that, and the bounding boxes idea is good. I'm a little concerned about the very large number of trigonometric calculations this will lead to. For a single, occasional search this would not be an issue, but I'm going to be performing this search thousands of times.

Is anyone aware of a datatype or third-party implementation that will index in three dimensions radially, or what it would take to accomplish this?

Cheers,
Demitri