PostGIS geometry support

Question

Can postgis for postgresql support complex geometric types like spheroids?

Answer 1

Yes it does support Spheroids, and in general PostGIS has much fuller capabilities than the similar offering for MySQL. I use PostGIS for this: www.trailbehind.com.

The PostGIS documentation sucks though.

Answer 2

There is some functions in postgis that takes a spehorid as an input and I'm pretty sure that you can define your own ( spheroid (or ellipsoid)) http://www.postgis.org/documentation/manual-1.3/ch06.html

Answer 3

PostGIS supports spheroids defined in WKT.

For an example, this page's section on ST_length_spheroid shows how the spheroid is defined, as well as using a sample.

As for other complex types - PostGIS supports pretty much all of the GEOS geometry types natively.