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I imported a large area of OpenStreetMap's planet.osm file into a postgresql database. The database contains a table called nodes. Each node has a geometry column called geom and a hstore column called tags. I need to extract nodes along a line that have certain keys in the tags column. To do that I use the following query:

SELECT id, tags  
FROM nodes  
WHERE ST_DWithin(nodes.geom, ST_MakeLine('{$geom1}', '{$geom2}'), 0.001)  
AND tags ? '{$type}';

$geom1 and $geom2 are geometries for start and end points of my line.
The $type variable contains the key I want to search for. Now, it can have one of the following values: 'historic' or 'tourist'.

The query given above works but it is too slow. I guess searching for a key in tags column takes too much time. I read about GIN and GIST indexes and I generated a GIN index using the following query:

CREATE INDEX nodes_tags_idx ON nodes USING GIN(tags);

After creating the index I searched again for nodes using the same first query but there is no change in performance.

How can I properly use GIN and GIST to index tags column so I can faster search for nodes that have a certain key in tags column?

Thank you

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  • 2
    The query is "too slow" but explain analyze in the comments says it takes 2.3ms. What duration do you expect? Jul 7, 2013 at 21:24

1 Answer 1

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You could try indexing the keys like in the following examples and see how that works:

CREATE INDEX nodes_tags_key_historic_idx on nodes ( (tags->'historic') );
CREATE INDEX nodes_tags_key_tourist_idx on nodes ( (tags->'tourist') );
ANALYZE nodes;

What does your query plan look like when run with EXPLAIN ANALYZE?

[edit]: Alternative indexes:

CREATE INDEX nodes_tags_key_tourist_idx2 on nodes ( (tags ? 'tourist') );
CREATE INDEX nodes_tags_key_historic_idx2 on nodes ( (tags ? 'historic') );

The latter shouldn't require any changes to your query.

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  • Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.
    – Paul White
    Aug 29, 2017 at 10:13
  • ...ON nodes((tags->'historic')) worked for me. And ...USING GIN(tags) didn't.
    – Kjetil S.
    Jan 10, 2019 at 8:44

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