  We present a case study about the spatial indexing and regional
classification of billions of geographic coordinates from geo-tagged social
network data using Hierarchical Triangular Mesh (HTM) implemented for Microsoft
SQL Server. Due to the lack of certain features of the HTM library, we use it
in conjunction with the GIS functions of SQL Server to significantly increase
the efficiency of pre-filtering of spatial filter and join queries. For
example, we implemented a new algorithm to compute the HTM tessellation of
complex geographic regions and precomputed the intersections of HTM triangles
and geographic regions for faster false-positive filtering. With full control
over the index structure, HTM-based pre-filtering of simple containment
searches outperforms SQL Server spatial indices by a factor of ten and
HTM-based spatial joins run about a hundred times faster.
