Re: Indexing large table of coordinates with GiST

As Remi notes, going with a pointcloud approach might be wiser, particularly if you aren’t storing much more about the points that coordinates and other lidar return information. Since you’re only working with points, depending on your spatial distribution (over poles? dateline?) you might just geohash them and index them with a btree instead. The index will work better than a rtree for points, efficiencywise, however you’ll still have a multi-billion record table, which could cause other slowdowns, depending on your plans for accessing this data once you’ve indexed it.

P.

http://postgis.net

If it is raster, you may consider using postgis raster type.
If you really want to keep that much geometry,
you may want to partition your data on a regular grid.
Cheers,
Rémi-C