I'm not sure why, but it seems that some people, I don't mean to imply
that you are one of them, think there is some magic MySQL can preform to
find points with in a given radius using the GIS extension. There is no
magic. They simply use the well known math required to determine what
points are inside the circle. I could be wrong but I doubt there is any
way to create an index that can directly indicate points with a a
certain distance of other points unless that index included the distance
from every point to every other point. That is obviously not practical
since with a set of only 14 points the index would have over 6 billion
entries.
lets call each of your dimensions d1, d2, d3 .... d96.
If you create an index on d1, d2, .... d69, you can then create a simple
query that will quickly find all points that will find all points that
are with in a bounding box. Since this query is going to get a bit
large with 96 dimensions, I would use code to create the query. I will
use php. Let's start with the desired radius being r and the test point
dimensions being in an array TestPointD[1] = x, TestPointD[2] = . . .
$select = 'SELECT `PointID`, ';
$where = 'WHERE ';
foreach($TestPointD as $i => $d){
$di = 'd' . "$i";
$select .= "`$di`, "
$MinD = $d - $r;
$MaxD = $d + $r;
$where .= "`$di` >= '$MinD' AND `$di` <= '$MaxD' AND ";
}
$select = substr($select, 0, -2); //trim of the trailing comma and space
$where = substr($where, 0, -4); //trim off the trailing 'AND '
$query = "$select FROM `points` $where";
Obviously this is going to give you points outside the sphere but still
inside the cube. However it will narrow down the set so the further
math will not take as long. If this were 3 dimensions with an uniform
distribution of points, about 52% of the points returned by that query
will be inside the sphere. I'm not sure how to calculate the ratio of
the volume sphere to a cube in 96 dimensions. Then it will be a
simple loop to find the points you really want. While this query will
likely return a lot of points that you don't want especially in 96D
space, it will reduce it enough that the following loop will be much
faster than looking all points in the table.
$result = mysql_query($query) or die("DB error $query " . mysql_error() );
while(($row = mysql_fetch_row($result))){
$sum
foreach($row as $i => $d){
if($i == 0){
$PointID = $d;
continue; // skip point id at $row[0]
}
$SumSq += pow($TestPointD[$i] - $d, 2);
}
if(sqrt($SumSq) <= $r){
print "$PointID is with in $r of test point.\n";
}
}
In an application I had that was similar (but in 2D) I would insert the
id of the points that passed the condition into a temp table. Then I
could join that temp table to other tables do other queries I may need
on those points.
Chris W
Werner Van Belle wrote:
Hello,
I have been pondering this for a while, but never really looked deeply
into the problem.
I have 96 dimensional points and I would like to pose queries such as:
'give me all points that are within such a radius of this one'. The gis
extensions to mysql might support such type of query. The problem is of
course that points are 2 dimensional and I'm not sure whether I can
extend it to more than 3 dimensions ?
Does anybody have an idea about this ?
Wkr,
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