Table F.3 shows the valid external representations for the cube type. x, y, etc. denote floating-point numbers.

It does not matter which order the opposite corners of a cube are entered in. The cube functions automatically swap values if needed to create a uniform “lower left — upper right” internal representation.

White space is ignored, so [(x),(y)] is the same as [ ( x ), ( y ) ].

Values are stored internally as 64-bit floating point numbers. This means that numbers with more than about 16 significant digits will be truncated.

The cube module includes a GiST index operator class for cube values. The operators supported by the GiST operator class are shown in Table F.4.

(Before PostgreSQL 8.2, the containment operators @> and <@ were respectively called @ and ~. These names are still available, but are deprecated and will eventually be retired. Notice that the old names are reversed from the convention formerly followed by the core geometric data types!)

The standard B-tree operators are also provided, for example

These operators do not make a lot of sense for any practical purpose but sorting. These operators first compare (a) to (c), and if these are equal, compare (b) to (d). That results in reasonably good sorting in most cases, which is useful if you want to use ORDER BY with this type.

Table F.5 shows the available functions.

I believe this union:

select cube_union('(0,5,2),(2,3,1)', '0');
cube_union
-------------------
(0, 0, 0),(2, 5, 2)
(1 row)

does not contradict common sense, neither does the intersection

select cube_inter('(0,-1),(1,1)', '(-2),(2)');
cube_inter
-------------
(0, 0),(1, 0)
(1 row)

In all binary operations on differently-dimensioned cubes, I assume the lower-dimensional one to be a Cartesian projection, i. e., having zeroes in place of coordinates omitted in the string representation. The above examples are equivalent to:

cube_union('(0,5,2),(2,3,1)','(0,0,0),(0,0,0)');
cube_inter('(0,-1),(1,1)','(-2,0),(2,0)');

The following containment predicate uses the point syntax, while in fact the second argument is internally represented by a box. This syntax makes it unnecessary to define a separate point type and functions for (box,point) predicates.

select cube_contains('(0,0),(1,1)', '0.5,0.5');
cube_contains
--------------
t
(1 row)

For examples of usage, see the regression test sql/cube.sql.

To make it harder for people to break things, there is a limit of 100 on the number of dimensions of cubes. This is set in cubedata.h if you need something bigger.

Original author: Gene Selkov, Jr. <selkovjr@mcs.anl.gov>, Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory.

My thanks are primarily to Prof. Joe Hellerstein (http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/jmh/) for elucidating the gist of the GiST (http://gist.cs.berkeley.edu/), and to his former student Andy Dong for his example written for Illustra. I am also grateful to all Postgres developers, present and past, for enabling myself to create my own world and live undisturbed in it. And I would like to acknowledge my gratitude to Argonne Lab and to the U.S. Department of Energy for the years of faithful support of my database research.

Minor updates to this package were made by Bruno Wolff III <bruno@wolff.to> in August/September of 2002. These include changing the precision from single precision to double precision and adding some new functions.

Additional updates were made by Joshua Reich <josh@root.net> in July 2006. These include cube(float8[], float8[]) and cleaning up the code to use the V1 call protocol instead of the deprecated V0 protocol.