Algorithm to find the polygon ID where a point belongs to

Question

I am wondering what is the simplest way to perform a look up of polygon Id based on the point location.

Input: a point with coordinates, a table of polygons

Output: the polygon Id where a point is located.

I am thinking to preload the polygon table into PostGIS (The size is about 220,000 entries). What is the best way to process all these data?

Thanks.

Answer 1

The ST_Contains operator in PostGIS does Point-in-Polygon analyses just fine. You may also be interested in this question about improving the performance of similar queries: Looking for fastest solution for Point in Polygon analysis of 200 million points