Geospatial Toolkit

The Geospatial Toolkit provides SQL functions, some of which are defined in the Open Geospatial Consortium Standard for Geographic Information, that you can use to efficiently process and index spatial data.

For example, you can use the functions provided by the Geospatial Toolkit with Global Positioning System (GPS) data from cell phones or vehicles to track the movement of entities in or around an area of interest, or to calculate spatial relationships among various geospatial or geographical features.

The functions provided by the Geospatial Toolkit are similar to those provided by Spatial Extender and Spatial Analytics, but with the following important differences:
  • Because the Geospatial Toolkit functions are implemented using Spark, they can take advantage of Spark's distributed processing capabilities. This improves overall performance.
  • The Geospatial Toolkit includes a function for performing spatiotemporal joins.
  • The Geospatial Toolkit functions are geodetic, and are accurate for all geometries without the need for projections, including large geometries such as entire countries or hemispheres, and geometries that are near the poles or the anti-meridian.
  • The Geospatial Toolkit functions employ geohashes derived from location data, which in most situations improves overall performance.
Note:
  • The Geospatial Toolkit uses the WGS84 ellipsoid manifold model of the Earth.
  • Unless otherwise indicated, all time related data is in milliseconds relative to the UNIX epoch (01 January 1970, 00:00:00 UTC) and are stored as data of type BIGINT.