One of the latest exciting additions to PostGIS 2.1 is a complete C implementation of ST_DumpPoints
which is a patch contributed by Nathan Wagner. Past versions of ST_DumpPoints piggy backed on
ST_Dump and plpgsql for recursion so this has been a long-awaited todo. This function is dear to my heart because it is a sub-step of many geoprocessing workflows. What's dearer to my heart though is getting rid of the memory copy bottlenecks that make plpgsql processes inherently
slower than C-native ones. That's probably too much to ask. In theory this new ST_DumpPoints version should be faster, but how much.
There was also some intimation that the new ST_DumpPoints implementation
has improvements over the C-based ST_Dump. I decided to put both of these theories to the test.
If you are on windows PostgreSQL 64-bit or using PostgreSQL 9.2+ - you can download experimental binaries for windows
Continue reading "Waiting for PostGIS 2.1 - Faster Dump Points"
