[shock-value]

There isn’t much information available on how its indexing works internally, whether tag existence / tag values can be indexed, etc. So it’s hard to judge the extent to which this could be a replacement for Postgres with PostGIS.

[geodesk]

Indexing in GeoDesk GOL files is predominantly spatial (a quadtree-like structure combined with r-trees), with probabilistic indexing for the most frequent keys (`highway`, `building`, `amenity`, etc.). This means queries with a spatial dimension execute very quickly (bounding-box queries have a typical throughput of tens of millions of features per second on a simple dual-core notebook). GeoDesk is less suitable for non-spatial queries (e.g. "Where in the world is the Louvre?" may take several seconds on a planet-size database), but we'll consider enhanced indexing for these scenarios if there are enough real-world use cases to warrant it.