postgresql/contrib/earthdistance
Bruce Momjian 558fae16e3 The attached patch enables the contrib subtree to build cleanly under
Cygwin with the possible exception of mSQL-interface.  Since I don't
have mSQL installed, I skipped this tool.

Except for dealing with a missing getopt.h (oid2name) and HUGE (seg),
the bulk of the patch uses the standard PostgreSQL approach to deal with
Windows DLL issues.

I tested the build aspect of this patch under Cygwin and Linux without
any ill affects.  Note that I did not actually attempt to test the code
for functionality.

The procedure to apply the patch is as follows:

    $ # save the attachment as /tmp/contrib.patch
    $ # change directory to the top of the PostgreSQL source tree
    $ patch -p0 </tmp/contrib.patch

Jason
2001-06-18 21:38:02 +00:00
..
Makefile The attached patch enables the contrib subtree to build cleanly under 2001-06-18 21:38:02 +00:00
README.earthdistance Add missing /contrib files 2000-06-19 14:02:16 +00:00
earthdistance.c pgindent run. Make it all clean. 2001-03-22 04:01:46 +00:00
earthdistance.sql.in Add missing /contrib files to CVS. 2000-06-15 19:05:22 +00:00

README.earthdistance

Date: Wed, 1 Apr 1998 15:19:32 -0600 (CST)
From: Hal Snyder <hal@vailsys.com>
To: vmehr@ctp.com
Subject: [QUESTIONS] Re: Spatial data, R-Trees

> From: Vivek Mehra <vmehr@ctp.com>
> Date: Wed, 1 Apr 1998 10:06:50 -0500

>  Am just starting out with PostgreSQL and would like to learn more about
> the spatial data handling ablilities of postgreSQL - in terms of using
> R-tree indexes, user defined types, operators and functions. 
> 
> Would you be able to suggest where I could find some code and SQL to
> look at to create these?

Here's the setup for adding an operator '<@>' to give distance in
statute miles between two points on the earth's surface. Coordinates
are in degrees. Points are taken as (longitude, latitude) and not vice
versa as longitude is closer to the intuitive idea of x-axis and
latitude to y-axis.

There's C source, Makefile for FreeBSD, and SQL for installing and
testing the function.

Let me know if anything looks fishy!

A note on testing C extensions - it seems not enough to drop a function
and re-create it - if I change a function, I have to stop and restart
the backend for the new version to be seen. I guess it would be too
messy to track which functions are added from a .so and do a dlclose
when the last one is dropped.