Given two shapes A and B, predicate function ST_Covers(A, B)
returns true
if no point in B lies outside of shape A. Otherwise, it returns false
.
In other words, shape A must completely cover every point in B.
This behavior is similar to ST_Contains
, except that the criteria for ST_Contains
are more exacting, and therefore some pairs of shapes will be accepted by this function that would be rejected by ST_Contains
.
ST_Covers
works on the following data types:
ST_Covers
will attempt to use any available spatial index to speed up its operation. Use the prefixed variant _ST_Covers
if you do not want any spatial indexes to be used.
This function is the inverse of ST_CoveredBy
.
Examples
The screenshots in these examples were generated using geojson.io, but they are designed to showcase the shapes, not the map. Representing GEOMETRY
data in GeoJSON can lead to unexpected results if using geometries with SRIDs other than 4326 (as shown below).
True
In this example, ST_Covers
returns true
because:
- No Point in the smaller Polygon B lies outside of the larger Polygon A.
SELECT ST_Covers(st_geomfromtext('SRID=4326;POLYGON((-87.906471 43.038902, -95.992775 36.153980, -75.704722 36.076944, -87.906471 43.038902))'), st_geomfromtext('SRID=4326;POLYGON((-87.623177 41.881832, -90.199402 38.627003, -82.446732 38.413651, -87.623177 41.881832))'));
st_covers
---------------
true
(1 row)
False
In this example, ST_Covers
returns false
because:
- Many Points in the smaller Polygon B lie outside of the larger Polygon A.
SELECT ST_Covers(st_geomfromtext('SRID=4326;POLYGON((-87.906471 43.038902, -95.992775 36.153980, -75.704722 36.076944, -87.906471 43.038902))'), st_geomfromtext('SRID=4326;POLYGON((-84.191605 39.758949, -75.165222 39.952583, -78.878738 42.880230, -84.191605 39.758949))'));
st_covers
---------------
false
(1 row)
See also
- Working with Spatial Data
- Spatial and GIS Glossary of Terms
- Spatial indexes
- Spatial functions
ST_CoveredBy
ST_Contains
ST_Within
ST_Intersects
ST_CoveredBy
ST_Disjoint
ST_Equals
ST_Overlaps
ST_Touches
ST_ConvexHull
ST_Union
- Migrate from Shapefiles
- Migrate from GeoJSON
- Migrate from GeoPackage
- Migrate from OpenStreetMap
- Introducing Distributed Spatial Data in Free, Open Source CockroachDB (blog post)