Descendants and Children filtered by popRank

Hi to everybody,
I'm using the APIs through YQL and I'm having some trouble in retrieving the children of a Region/State filtered by type and popRank.
The main purpose is to retrieve all the cities of for example Europe that has popRank >= 11. I starts the cycle retrieving all the children of Europe (Countries) using :

CODE

select woeid,placeTypeName,name from geo.places.children where parent_woeid='24865675' and placetype='12'

I retrieves all countries of Europe, then I cycle inside each country to retrieve their main admin divions using this:

CODE

select woeid,placeTypeName,name from geo.places.children where parent_woeid='WOEID of each country' and placetype='8'

Finally the problem comes using this for retrieving all cities inside each admin divions:

CODE

select woeid from geo.places.children where parent_woeid='7153344' and placetype='7'

In the above query I'm trying to retrieve all the cities of Sicily (Italian region) but I have no results neighter errors.
So I decided to use Descendants:

CODE

[select woeid from geo.places.descendants where ancestor_woeid='7153344' and placetype='7'

and it seems to work, I really don't understand this inconsistency using Descendant or Children API!

Still my purpose is retrieve all cities with popRank >= "11".
Since is not possible to apply this filter as a parameter of Descendant API I tried this:

CODE

 select woeid,placeTypeName,name,popRank from geo.places where woeid in (select woeid from geo.places.descendants(10000) where ancestor_woeid='7153344' and placetype='7' )  and popRank>='11'

But this results depends mainly of the remote limits of the number of results returned by the inner query (10.000). I just discovered the max number of results from the GeoPlanet is 2000 (right?) so even though i put 10.000 I will never have a real result cause the inner query just scans ALL the cities children of a Region and the local filter popRank>='11' is applied later!

So the results depends on the number of cities for each regions: if they are <=2000 I will have real results otherwise I will have a false positive.

Any workaround, advise, tips to avoid to scans ALL the cities and then apply later the local filter (popRank) ?
Thanks and sorry for the long post!
Bye bye

The descendants table is the correct one to use to find towns within a state, but you need to include "and view='long'" in your query in order to filter by popRank. as only woeid, name, and placeTypeName are returned by default for the descendants table. Here is an example YQL query that will return all large cities in Sicily:

CODE

select woeid, name, popRank from geo.places.descendants where ancestor_woeid='7153344' and placetype='7' and view='long' and popRank >= 11

I found that the children of the region "Lombardia" of Italy, WOEID="7153338" is not found, you can try it out from the YQL console: YQL Descendats of Lombardia
I guess it is a temporary problem

Still not working :(Yahoo! Geo Technologies

Lombardia has over 6,000 descendant towns so your query will not return any results. the Province of Pavia alone has 1,400 towns.

You will need to go another level deeper in order to ensure that results can be returned. If you get no results for a state WOEID with a YQL query on the descendants table, you can iterate over the list of administrative children of the state. You can get this list using the geo.counties table:

CODE

select woeid from geo.counties where place=7153338

This returns the WOEIDs for the provinces of Lombardia.

Please note that some countries, such as Monaco and Andorra, do not have second-level administrative areas. Also, you do not need to enclose numbers, like WOEIDs and placetypes, in quotes within YQL queries.

Thanks for the reply, I have already asked in another post (with no answer) if there is a way to know the number in adavance, a sort of "count" statement of the sql syntax.
Even I'm not interested in the data is it possible to know only the numbers of results either using Geo.Planet or Yql ?

Does exit a way to know if a place have children of a particular type? Example in pseudocode

CODE

if (Lombardia has children of type county)   retrieve(Lombardia.Counties);
Else retrieve(Lombardia.Cities);

Thanks again, bye