Calculating Minkowski distance between two rows

From: Babak Alipour <babak(dot)alipour(at)gmail(dot)com>
To: pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Calculating Minkowski distance between two rows
Date: 2016-04-25 14:07:14
Message-ID: CA+_of16FyVzbvfeoBohRsZSDxurHDGY-2t1zThTfV4_446bz3w@mail.gmail.com
Views: Raw Message | Whole Thread | Download mbox | Resend email
Thread:
Lists: pgsql-general

Greetings everyone,

I'm a novice plpgsql user.
For an application, I'm trying to write a user-defined function that takes
a row of some table (let's say with k fields) and takes another row from
another table (again with k fields); then calculate the Euclidean,
Manhattan or generally Minkowski distance (with some p) and then return an
integer.
I've written this:

CREATE FUNCTION euclidean_distance(row1 table_train, row2 table_test, OUT
distance DOUBLE PRECISION) AS $$
DECLARE
tmp DOUBLE PRECISION;
BEGIN
FOR col IN SELECT column_name FROM information_schema.columns WHERE
table_name=table_train LOOP
tmp := (row1.col - row2.col);
distance += tmp*tmp;
END LOOP;
distance := sqrt(distance);
END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

Could anyone please help me fix this function so that I can pass any two
rows of two tables (with same number of columns) and have their distance
returned.

Best regards,
Babak Alipour

--
*Babak Alipour ,*
*University of Florida*

Responses

Browse pgsql-general by date

  From Date Subject
Next Message Alvaro Herrera 2016-04-25 14:20:11 Re: Columnar store as default for PostgreSQL 10?
Previous Message Achilleas Mantzios 2016-04-25 14:04:54 Re: psql color hostname prompt