[osmosis-dev] postGIS: bbox columns?

[David Carmean]

Who is knowledgable about the osm/postGIS simple schema design and 
associated scripts?

I have several questions, and keep coming up with others, as 
I experiment with using osm data as GIS base data, but today's 
question is:

    Who/what uses the ways.bbox column?  Is there something/somebody 
    that cannot use the linestring gist index, but instead requires 
    an explicit bounding box geometry?

For what it's worth, I reversed the order and created the 
linestring geometry column first, and found that creating
the bbox column from the linestring instead was seemingly 
thousands of times faster than creating it (the bbox) from 
the nodes table.  Once I fix a hardware problem I plan to 
get some hard numbers.

Thanks.