A LINESTRING is a collection of Points that are "strung together" into one geometric object. A LineString can be used to represent an arbitrary curve, such as a Bézier curve. In practice, this means that LineStrings are useful for representing real-world objects such as roads and rivers.
The coordinates of each Point that makes up the LineString are translated according to the current spatial reference system (denoted by an SRID) to determine what the Point "is", or what it "means" relative to the other spatial objects (if any) in the data set.
Examples
A LineString can be created from SQL by calling the st_geomfromtext function on a LineString definition expressed in the Well Known Text (WKT) format as shown below.
SELECT ST_GeomFromText('LINESTRING(0 0, 1440 900)');
st_geomfromtext
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
0102000000020000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000008096400000000000208C40
(1 row)
You can also make a LineString using the aggregate function form of st_makeline.
See also
- Spatial objects
- POINT
- POLYGON
- MULTIPOINT
- MULTILINESTRING
- MULTIPOLYGON
- GEOMETRYCOLLECTION
- Introducing Distributed Spatial Data in Free, Open Source CockroachDB (blog post)
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