Hi Dev's,

I am interested in writing an address standardized in C that could be callable from SQL. I understand the basics of doing this from supporting pgRouting and writing some additional commands. It would get used something like:

select * from standardize(address, city, state, country, postcode);
select * from standardize(address_one_line);

and would return a standardized set of fields like: house_num, street, city, state, country, postcode. These could be then used to create standardized reference table or it could be passed into the geocoder that would search the standardized reference table.

What I am struggling with is how to best initial the address parser/standardize. The concept I have in mind is to have some tables that represent the lexicon, gazetteer, parsing rules, etc. This data could be specific to country and/or country-state. I could be fairly small or quite large. For example, there are about 40K unique city names based on the USPS zipcodes and about 7K of them have duplicate standardizations based on state.

On the one hand I can read these tables on every request and build the internal structures, parse the request, and throw out the internal structures.

Basically once the reference source records have been standardized you should not be changing the above tables because you want to standardize future search requests based on the same rules that the reference road segments were standardized.

And ideally you do not want to spend the time to rebuild these internal structures on every search request.

So is there a mechanism for building some internal data and holding on to it between requests. I suppose I could store it in a blob, but it would then need to be de-toasted on every search request.

Maybe, I'm this is an non-issue, but it seems to impact the design depending on what options I might have and how they are implemented and accessed from the code.

Thoughts?

Thanks for any help or suggestions,
  -Steve W
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