PostGIS Cookbook - Second Edition

Using triggers to populate the geometry column

In this recipe, we imagine that we have ever increasing data in our database, which needs spatial representation; however, in this case we want a hardcoded geometry column to be updated each time an insertion happens on the database, converting our x and y values to geometry as and when they are inserted into the database.

The advantage of this approach is that the geometry is then registered in the geometry_columns view, and therefore this approach works reliably with more PostGIS client types than creating a new geospatial view. This also provides the advantage of allowing for a spatial index that can significantly speed up a variety of queries.