> > > AFAIR, none of the index access methods except btree 
> > > handle NULLs at all --- they just ignore NULL values
> > > and don't store them in the index.
...
> 
> and what does this error means ?
> 
> create table rtree_test ( r box );
> copy rtree_test from stdin;
> \N
> ........ total 10,000 NULLS
> \.
> 
> create index rtree_test_idx on rtree_test using rtree ( r );
> --ERROR:  floating point exception! The last floating point 
> operation either exceeded legal ranges or was a divide by zero
> 
> seems rtree doesn't ignore NULL ?

No, it doesn't. As well as GiST. Only hash ignores them.
And there is no code in GiST & rtree that take care about NULL
keys. It's probably ok for GiST which is "meta-index" - 
index/type methods implementator should decide how to handle NULLs.
As for rtree - seems it's better to ignore NULLs as we did before
for single key btree: rtree is just variation of it.

Vadim

Tue, 19 Dec 2000 16:08:00 -0800
"Mikheev, Vadim" <vmikheev@SECTORBASE.COM>
RE: Who is a maintainer of GiST code ?