Re: For Loop in PostGIS

I am new to postgresql and I'm working with two tables, both having a geometry for postGIS.  What I am trying to do is get the five nearest people from one list for every person in the second.  I was trying to do this in a for loop - all I'm trying to do for now is display the 5 people for each person in the one list.
 
This code works as a command line argument to psql, and correctly finds five people for one query:
 
select lastname, city from eng_alumni order by ST_distance(point_geom,
 (select the_geom from points where text = 'Smith')) asc limit 5;
 
I tried to follow a for loop using the documentation, but it is not working.  This seems like something that a for loop would work well for, at least in other languages that I have learned.  Here is the code that I tried (running from a command line)
 
create table temp;
FOR temp IN SELECT text, the_geom FROM points ORDER BY text LOOP
  select lastname, latitude, longitude from eng_alumni order by
  ST_distance(point_geom, (select the_geom from temp)) asc limit 5;
END LOOP;
 
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
Thanks,
 
  Bryan Manuel
 

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