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Status Not under consideration
Workspace IBM i
Categories Db2 for i
Created by Guest
Created on Feb 24, 2025

RELATED IDEAS

Improve implementation of Geospatial Data Types

See this idea on ideas.ibm.com

Two parts to this based on observations to date. 

1) 

Currently the supported Geospatial data types, as referenced in QSYS2.SYSTYPES, are based upon BLOB column types. However, you cannot specify the size of the column  like you can with BLOB columns, instead this defaults to 2GB. Seems over the top with respect to ST_POINT and other types where only a small number of values will be specified. Being able to user define the storage size, and possibly the allocated storage, but that doesn't seem so critical, so that it matches the options for BLOB columns would be beneficial. 

2)

I gather that the values are stored in floating point values; which by definition are approximate and differences can be seen between values written via the various QSYS2.ST_???? scalar functions and read via the QSYS2.ST_ASTEXT scalar function. Whilst I am uncertain as to what degree of accuracy values can be stored down to, 8 decimal places is accurate to 1.11mm. Storing the values in a decimal field of DECIMAL(11,8) definition, large enough for the range of values permitted, would only take up 6 bytes per value. Storing the values within the BLOB column in this manner would provide accuracy without the approximation common to floating point values. 

 

Idea priority Medium
  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Mar 21, 2025
    IBM does not intend to provide a solution to this Idea at this time, so it is being closed.

    The technology behind our Geospatial implementation is supported by the IBM Watson research team. They used floating point for calculations. While we agree that the inexact nature of floating point is hard to explain to others, we cannot modify that part of the solution. Remember, too, that what you perceive as a straight line is not necessarily straight when projected on a spherical earth. Going 100 miles north, 100 miles east, 100 miles south, then 100 miles west does not get you back to your starting point due to the spherical nature of the earth. This is taken into account with our Geospatial support.

    The spatial data types are all BLOB(2G). Each is defined with an ALLOCATE 512 clause to minimize the performance impact for accessing the BLOB storage. Providing built-in data types for Geospatial data to allow the user to provide the length could be done, but it has a very high cost and will not be implemented.

    Db2 for i development team
    IBM Power Systems Development

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