What happens when you embed geospatial capabilities in generalist data tools? More people engaging with geo data.
I just returned from the inaugural Cloud-Native Geospatial conference. It was fantastic, I highly recommend you jump in if Jed and team organized another.
One of the core questions discussed in the breakouts and in the halls was how to broaden the geospatial audience. How can we better communicate geo data’s utility, in all industries and domains? Many tactics and case studies were debated, but the one I kept coming back to is that of DuckDB.
This chart could’ve been pretty bleak! Interest in “geospatial” (a t
14 Comments
fithisux
I agree
jeffbee
Ehh I tried to do some spatial stuff but there just wasn't enough there, or I could not figure out how to use it. Loading spatial information into ipython and fiddling with it is well-traveled and it doesn't seem to me that SQL is an inherently lower hurdle for the user.
wodenokoto
I’m not sure I agree that “install geospatial” is a game changer in simplicity compared to “pip install geopandas”.
They are both one line.
WD-42
Is it that much simpler than ‘load extension postgis’? I know geos and gdal have always kinda been a pain, but I feel like docker has abstracted it all away anyway. ‘docker pull postgis’ is pretty easy, granted I’m not familiar with what else duckdb offers.
larsiusprime
“import geopandas” also exists and has for some time. Snark aside, WHAT is special about duckDB? I wish the author had actually shown some practical examples so I could understand their claims better.
twelvechairs
DuckDB is a great thing for geospatial but most important of the past decade? There's so many tools in different categories it wouldnt come near top for me. Some might be QGIS, postGIS (still the standard), ArcGIS online (still the standard), JS mapping tools like mapbox (i prefer deckgl), new data types like COG, geopackage and geoparquet, photogrammetry tools, 3d tiles, core libraries like gdal and now pdal, shapely, etc.
wenc
I'm a big fan of DuckDB and I do geospatial analysis, mostly around partitioning geographies (into Uber H3 hexagons), calculating Haversine distances, calculating areas of geometries, figuring out which geometry a point falls in, etc. Many of these features have existed in some form or other in geopandas or postgis, so DuckDB's spatial extensions bring nothing new.
But what DuckDB as an engine does is it lets me work directly on parquet/geoparquet files at scale (vectorized and parallelized) on my local desktop. It beats geopandas in that respect. It's a quality of life improvement to say the least.
DuckDB also has an extension architecture that admits more exotic geospatial features like Hilbert curves, Uber H3 support.
https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/extensions/spatial/functions….
https://duckdb.org/community_extensions/extensions/h3.html
fidotron
Honestly, I think it's actually https://www.uber.com/en-CA/blog/h3/
bingaweek
We need a "come on" clause for these absurd headlines. Come on.
yoyopa
[dead]
badmonster
How might embedding spatial capabilities directly into general-purpose data tools like DuckDB reshape who participates in geospatial analysis—and what kinds of problems they choose to solve?
jparishy
I work on geospatial apps and the software I think I am most excited about is https://felt.com/. I want to see them expand their tooling such that maps and data source authentication/authorization was controllable by the developer, to enable tenant isolation with proprietary data access. They could really disrupt how geospatial tech gets integrated into consumer apps.
This article doesn't acknowledge how niche this stuff is and it's a lot of training to get people to up to speed on coordinate systems, projections, transformations, etc. I would replace a lot of my custom built mapping tools with Felt if it were possible, so I could focus on our core geospatial processes and not the code to display and play with it in the browser, which is almost as big if not bigger in terms of LOC to maintain.
As mentioned by another commenter, this DuckDB DX as described is basically the same as PostGIS too.
patja
SQL Server has geospatial capabilities without any extensions or add-ons. I've been happily using geospatial datatypes on the free Express version for years, probably well over a decade.
cyanydeez
No. QGIS is.
Good god.