How many views...

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Hi,

a (maybe/probably) stupid idea just popped to my mind:
Problem:
I need to search a lot of locations based on distance (simple zipcode match
based on longitude and latitude). However I need to calculate the distance
between each of the nodes, so if you are in xxx I need to get the distance to
all others in the database. I'm currently doing this with a stored procedure
that gets the originating zipcode and a maximum distance in miles which then
selects all other nodes within that search radius. This is pretty unhandy,
but it works.

The idea:
I could create a view for every node in the system which calculates the
distance in the result set, making it easy to handle for the application:
select * from <view> where distance <= 50
The problem is, that the data will possibly contain thousands of nodes. I'd
also need 2 or 3 views per node - which could lead to 50.000 or even 100.000
views.

The question:
1) does it make sense to do this performance-wise?
2) does this make sense at all?
3) can postgresql handle that many views?

Thanks for any opinions (or better ideas than a stored proc or the views
concept)

UC

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