GPGeorge
George Hepworth
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- Nov 25, 2004
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Sometimes reading these discussions, wild ideas pop into my head. Would it be possible to integrate somehow with Google maps for some part of this task?Here's a thought... I see you are from the UK. Your postal system has certain "locale" codes - you might call them something different, of course. We in the USA call the postal area codes "ZIP codes". If you pre-sort everything and compute distances only for things within the same postal codes, that will for a pre-filter that should help reduce the size of your data set to something manageable.
Further, if you can use your postal data to determine which postal codes are adjacent to each other, that should take care of reducing the address set considerably. With 3000 client locations, they are SURELY spread out over several postal areas, so that should give you a tremendous yet practical filter. You would probably only want to work on addresses for postal codes that are the same or that are geographically adjacent.
After all, (to give you a USA example), our postal code for a part of the city of Los Angeles is 90210. New Orleans is 70121. I live in Metairie, which is 70006. If we look up distances, 90210 is a couple of thousand miles from 70121 and 70006 - but 70121 and 70006 are less than 10 miles from each other. So when computing distances, you could skip looking at 90210 and 70121 - but would continue to work on 70006 vs 70121 because they are much closer. If you decide that the postal area centers are more than, say, 50 miles apart, you could probably skip the computation and not bother with storing those distances.
Does this approach make sense?