I have been having some difficulty figuring out how to perform searches on large sky regions with the qserv_areaspec_poly function.

It appears that the system always tries to find the smaller of the two possible interpretations of the polygon, so it's impossible to use this function to perform searches larger than half the sky.

A tangible use case for this in LSST might be to exclude the Galactic center from a search.

(Yes, this can be done with a non- qserv_areaspec_ WHERE clause in a full sky table scan, and probably without a great loss in performance.  But why not provide a way to do it with the Qserv optimizations?)

It's not clear whether there's a way to define a region with a restriction only on one of ra or dec, either.  It might be possible to do this with the right arguments to qserv_areaspec_box, but it's not documented that I can see.

It's also not clear to me how one might define a search that, say, excluded the entire Galactic plane but, again, still preserved Qserv shard-selection optimizations.  Could we have Qserv functions that respect Galactic or ecliptic coordinates?  

This is relevant to the implementation of the corresponding ADQL functions in dbserv.