GiST and SP-GiST indexes can be created for table columns of temporal cells. An example of index creation is as follows:
CREATE INDEX Trips_Cells_SPGist_Idx ON Trips USING SPGist(Cells);
The GiST and SP-GiST indexes store the bounding box for the temporal cells, which is an stbox, as all spatiotemporal types: the geodetic extent of the cell boundaries together with the time period.
Each operator class carries the name of the temporal type it indexes, so a th3index column takes th3index_rtree_ops for GiST and th3index_quadtree_ops or th3index_kdtree_ops for SP-GiST, and the tquadbin and ts2cell names likewise. The quadtree class is the SP-GiST default and the k-d tree class is named explicitly. A B-tree and a hash operator class are defined as well, ordering and hashing by the underlying temporal value.
A GiST or SP-GiST index can accelerate queries involving the following operators:
<<, &<, &>, >>, <<|, &<|, |&>, |>>, which only consider the spatial dimension in temporal cells,
<<#, &<#, #&>, #>>, which only consider the time dimension in temporal cells,
&&, @>, <@, ~=, -|-, which consider as many dimensions as they are shared by the indexed column and the query argument.
These operators work on bounding boxes, not the entire values.