Requirements for the Spatiotemporal Search extension

The Informix® Spatiotemporal Search extension requires the Informix® TimeSeries extension, the Informix® Spatial extension, and the R-tree index extension. The time series that you create for spatiotemporal search must conform to certain requirements.

Software and hardware requirements

The Spatiotemporal Search extension is subject to the hardware and software requirements of the TimeSeries and the Spatial extensions.

Database and table requirements

The database can be a standard database or a tenant database.

All valid configurations of time series tables are supported.

The TimeSeries extension must be registered in the database and a time series table must exist.

The Spatial and R-tree index extensions must be registered in the database.

Time series definition

Although a regular time series is supported, an irregular time series is more appropriate for moving object data.

All types of time series data are supported, including hertz, compressed, and BSON data.

You can use rolling window containers, but you must manually rebuild the spatiotemporal index when you attach or detach rolling window intervals.

TimeSeries subtype requirements

Your latitude and longitude data must be FLOAT values that use the spatial reference system 4326 (WGS 84). In the TimeSeries subtype, the latitude and longitude values can be in two FLOAT columns or in a single BSON column that contains documents with FLOAT values.

You can use the default TimeSeries subtype structure to optimize your spatiotemporal indexing performance. The default TimeSeries subtype must have the following structure:

  1. The first column is the time stamp field. This requirement is true of all TimeSeries subtypes.
  2. The second column has a FLOAT data type to hold longitude data.
  3. The third column has a FLOAT data type to hold latitude data.
  4. Optional additional columns can have any data type that is supported in a TimeSeries subtype.

If your TimeSeries subtype does not have the default structure, you must identify the sources of your location data in the position field of the BSON parameters document when you start spatiotemporal indexing.

Replication

You can replicate spatiotemporal indexes between a high-availability data replication primary server and a read-only secondary server.