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ElasticSearch isn't a spatial database per se, it's an exceptional search engine. It natively understand geo points, radii, bounding boxes, polygonal geo filter

ElasticSearch isn't a spatial database per se, it's an exceptional search engine. It natively understand geo points, radii, bounding boxes, polygonal geo filter, geo faceting etc. If it can be represented as a geo point or a composite of multiple geo points, then ElasticSearch can grok it. Otherwise, no. If you want to query arbitrary paths, that's on you to bridge the gap between a spatial database and a graph store. I'm not really sure what you're looking for. This post was about OpenStreetMaps.

michaelt 14y ago
Then, in answer to the question "Why are people hellbent on using Postgres" I'd say it's to do the kind of searches I described, which are a native feature of spatial databases like PostGIS and Oracle Spatial.
- codewright 14y ago
  You never actually clarified as to what you wanted that wasn't included in the list I provided.
  - michaelt 14y ago
    Here is a diagram: http://imgur.com/yHbS7 http://imgur.com/yHbS7 I store paths which are comprised of an ordered sequence of points. Depending on what spatial tool you're using, you might call this a path, a linestring, a line, or an ordinate array. In the diagram the points are black dots and the path is shown in purple. I want to do a bounding box query - finding the paths that are entirely or partly inside a given box. In the diagram, the box I'm querying for is shown in red. As you can see in the diagram, the purple path passes through the red box, but none of the black points defining the path are within the box. I can accomplish this with a single query using Oracle Spatial [1] or PostGIS [2]. It requires that the spatial database understand shapes more complicated than just points. Can elasticsearch? There aren't any examples of this I can find in the documentation. [1] http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B12037_01/appdev.101/b10826/sdo_operat.htm#BGEJHDGD http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B12037_01/appdev.101/b10826/sdo_op... [2] http://postgis.refractions.net/docs/ST_Intersects.html http://postgis.refractions.net/docs/ST_Intersects.html
    - codewright 14y ago
      You could do this pretty easily with ElasticSearch given that vectors and paths are composed of start/end points, with varying degrees of customizability, but whether or not that would be a good idea depends a great deal on your query patterns and how much customizability and scalability you need. The strengths of ElasticSearch are in trival sharding and replication intelligent, fast, and soft real-time search. It's also got a very powerful, easy to understand, highly programmable query syntax that is very easy to generate in code. It's not a spatial database and what I was originally talking about wasn't designed to solve pathing/graph traversal, but you could still do n-dimensional indexed spatial search in ElasticSearch and that is something I do on a regular basis although it's not the "base" use-case for their geo API.

michaelt 14y ago

Then, in answer to the question "Why are people hellbent on using Postgres" I'd say it's to do the kind of searches I described, which are a native feature of spatial databases like PostGIS and Oracle Spatial.

codewright 14y ago
You never actually clarified as to what you wanted that wasn't included in the list I provided.
- michaelt 14y ago
  Here is a diagram: http://imgur.com/yHbS7 http://imgur.com/yHbS7 I store paths which are comprised of an ordered sequence of points. Depending on what spatial tool you're using, you might call this a path, a linestring, a line, or an ordinate array. In the diagram the points are black dots and the path is shown in purple. I want to do a bounding box query - finding the paths that are entirely or partly inside a given box. In the diagram, the box I'm querying for is shown in red. As you can see in the diagram, the purple path passes through the red box, but none of the black points defining the path are within the box. I can accomplish this with a single query using Oracle Spatial [1] or PostGIS [2]. It requires that the spatial database understand shapes more complicated than just points. Can elasticsearch? There aren't any examples of this I can find in the documentation. [1] http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B12037_01/appdev.101/b10826/sdo_operat.htm#BGEJHDGD http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B12037_01/appdev.101/b10826/sdo_op... [2] http://postgis.refractions.net/docs/ST_Intersects.html http://postgis.refractions.net/docs/ST_Intersects.html
  - codewright 14y ago
    You could do this pretty easily with ElasticSearch given that vectors and paths are composed of start/end points, with varying degrees of customizability, but whether or not that would be a good idea depends a great deal on your query patterns and how much customizability and scalability you need. The strengths of ElasticSearch are in trival sharding and replication intelligent, fast, and soft real-time search. It's also got a very powerful, easy to understand, highly programmable query syntax that is very easy to generate in code. It's not a spatial database and what I was originally talking about wasn't designed to solve pathing/graph traversal, but you could still do n-dimensional indexed spatial search in ElasticSearch and that is something I do on a regular basis although it's not the "base" use-case for their geo API.