[riddle]

Hmm — actually, looking at SamBauers’ tip three posts back, I see a problem.

My intention is to build a Google Maps mashup plotting topics on a map. That requires me to be able to efficiently search the entire database for all points which fall within the bounding box of the map. (Actually that’s not quite true: I give Google’s API a list of points and it sifts through them for the ones that fit the current map view, but in either case I need to know the coordinates of a bunch of points at once.)

However, if I have to call get_topic() for every topic in the database in order to get its coordinates, that’s going to result in a ridiculous number of database hits every time I render a map. Right?

I believe I need a table, whether it’s bb_topics or one I create, which will let me access the coordinates all the topics in one query. Or is there an efficient way to do that using topicmeta and I’m missing it?