Not being familiar with Census blocks, would it be fair to say they are a rectangular? Are they space filling and non-overlapping? Are they all the same size or of varying size? The regularity of the problem has direct impacts on how clever you can be with grid organization.

At the least, I note that Geo::ShapeFile->new does file access, and as such it's likely a good idea to preload all shape objects rather that loading them at compare time - how much diskspace is devoted to your shape files?

In reply to Re: Need an intelligent join algorithm for matching coordinates to shapefiles (.shp) by kennethk
in thread Need an intelligent join algorithm for matching coordinates to shapefiles (.shp) by whakka

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