I took your (Tom, Oleg, and Teodor's) advice and changed my GiST code so
it compresses a normal GEOMETRY into a BOX3D-only-GEOMETRY by striping
out the actual geometric information. This way, everything is
consistent.
I now appear to be able to create and use a GiST index (well, it works
on my 1 test case ;^) ).
Unfortunately, when I issue the CREATE INDEX command, it takes a really
long time. The system goes to about 80% iowait (according to top), or
mostly idle. There's lots of memory free. Any ideas why?
dave