Data Engineering Podcast Scale Your Spatial Analysis By Building It In SQL With Syntax Extensions
Feb 7, 2022
59:54
Centralize Spatial Data For Scale
- Spatial data often arrives in hundreds of file formats and sizes, requiring strong data management skills.
- Moving data into a spatial SQL store centralizes formats and scales analysis without constant file juggling.
Use ST_* Functions And Read Docs
- Use ST_ prefixed functions (ST_Intersects, ST_Distance, etc.) as a common spatial SQL surface across engines.
- Read each database's docs because implementations and tolerances differ despite shared names.
Function Names Hide Implementation Gaps
- Identical function names can behave differently because of data tolerances and implementation details.
- Small geometry variances (border offsets) can flip spatial predicates like intersects or overlaps across systems.
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Introduction
00:00 • 2min
The Best Data Bases for Geo Spatial Analysis
01:57 • 2min
Is It a Good Idea to Use Spatial Relationships in the Real World?
03:47 • 3min
Post G I S, and Other Implementations of Post S
07:16 • 3min
The Difference Between Intersex and Within Versus Overlaps
10:03 • 3min
Geospatial Data Engineering - Is There a Common Representation?
13:09 • 4min
The Challenges of Segmenting Geometries
16:46 • 3min
How Much Background Knowledge Is Necessary?
19:30 • 4min
Is There a Difference Between a Projection and an Analysis?
23:01 • 2min
Is There a Difference Between a Data Scientist and a Statistical Analyst?
25:27 • 4min
Scaling for Multiple Geographies or Cities or Something Like That
29:02 • 3min
Geospatial Data Engineer - Is There a Way to Integrate Geometric Data Checks?
32:07 • 4min
Data Pipelines - A Data Integration Platform Built for Constant Change
36:02 • 4min
Is There a Way to Convert a Vector Into a Geometry?
40:29 • 4min
What Are Some of the Coolest Use Cases for Geo Spatial Data?
44:57 • 4min
The Challenges of Working With Spatial Data in a Sequel Environment
48:53 • 3min
The Best Workflow for Go Data?
51:32 • 4min
Geospatial Data - What's Next?
55:16 • 2min
The Biggest Gap in Data Management
57:04 • 3min
Summary
Along with globalization of our societies comes the need to analyze the geospatial and geotemporal data that is needed to manage the growth in commerce, communications, and other activities. In order to make geospatial analytics more maintainable and scalable there has been an increase in the number of database engines that provide extensions to their SQL syntax that supports manipulation of spatial data. In this episode Matthew Forrest shares his experiences of working in the domain of geospatial analytics and the application of SQL dialects to his analysis.
Announcements
- Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
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- Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Matthew Forrest about doing spatial analysis in SQL
Interview
- Introduction
- How did you get involved in the area of data management?
- Can you describe what spatial SQL is and some of the use cases that it is relevant for?
- compatibility with/comparison to syntax from PostGIS
- What is involved in implementation of spatial logic in database engines
- mapping geospatial concepts into declarative syntax
- foundational data types
- data modeling
- workflow for analyzing spatial data sets outside of database engines
- translating from e.g. geopandas to SQL
- level of support in database engines for spatial data types
- What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen spatial SQL used?
- What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working with spatial SQL?
- When is SQL the wrong choice for spatial analysis?
- What do you have planned for the future of spatial analytics support in SQL for the Carto platform?
Contact Info
Parting Question
- From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?
Closing Announcements
- Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other show, Podcast.__init__ to learn about the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used.
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Links
- Carto
- Spatial SQL Blog Post
- Spatial Analysis
- PostGIS
- QGIS
- KML
- Shapefile
- GeoJSON
- Paul Ramsey’s Blog
- Norwegian SOSI
- GDAL
- Google Cloud Dataflow
- GeoBEAM
- Carto Data Observatory
- WGS84 Projection
- EPSG Code
- PySAL
- GeoMesa
- Uber H3 Spatial Indexing
- PGRouting
- Spatialite
The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA