Querying spatial data in Amazon Redshift

Spatial data describes the position and shape of a geometry in a defined space (a spatial reference system). Amazon Redshift supports spatial data with the GEOMETRY and GEOGRAPHY data types, which contain spatial data and optionally the data's spatial reference system identifier (SRID).

Spatial data contains geometric data that you can use to represent geographic features. Examples of this type of data include weather reports, map directions, tweets with geographic positions, store locations, and airline routes. Spatial data plays an important role in business analytics, reporting, and forecasting.

You can query spatial data with Amazon Redshift SQL functions. Spatial data contains geometric values for an object.

The GEOMETRY data type operations work on the Cartesian plane. Although the spatial reference system identifier (SRID) is stored inside the object, this SRID is merely an identifier of the coordinate system and plays no role in the algorithms used to process the GEOMETRY objects. Conversely, the operations on the GEOGRAPHY data type treat the coordinates inside objects as spherical coordinates on a spheroid. This spheroid is defined by the SRID, which references a geographic spatial reference system. By default, GEOGRAPHY data types are created with spatial reference (SRID) 4326, referencing the World Geodetic System (WGS) 84. For more information about SRIDs, see Spatial reference system in Wikipedia.

You can use the ST_Transform function to transform the coordinates from various spatial reference systems. After the transformation of the coordinates is done, you can also use a simple cast between the two, as long as the input GEOMETRY is encoded with the geographic SRID. This cast simply copies coordinates without any further transformation. For example:

SELECT ST_AsEWKT(ST_GeomFromEWKT('SRID=4326;POINT(10 20)')::geography);

st_asewkt
------------------------
 SRID=4326;POINT(10 20)

To better understand the difference between GEOMETRY and GEOGRAPHY data types, consider calculating the distance between the Berlin airport (BER) and the San Francisco airport (SFO) using the World Geodetic System (WGS) 84. Using the GEOGRAPHY data type, the result is in meters. When using GEOMETRY data type with SRID 4326, the result is in degrees, which can’t convert to meters because the distance of one degree depends on where on the globe geometries are located.

Calculations on the GEOGRAPHY data type are mostly used for realistic round earth calculations such as the precise area of a country without distortion. But they are far more expensive to compute. Therefore, ST_Transform can transform your coordinates to an appropriate local projected coordinate system and do the calculation on the GEOMETRY data type faster.

Using spatial data, you can run queries to do the following:

You can use the GEOMETRY data type to hold the values of spatial data. A GEOMETRY value in Amazon Redshift can define two-dimensional (2D), three-dimensional (3DZ), two-dimensional with a measure (3DM), and four-dimensional (4D) geometry primitive data types:

For more information about geometry primitive data types, see Well-known text representation of geometry in Wikipedia.

You can use the GEOGRAPHY data type to hold the values of spatial data. A GEOGRAPHY value in Amazon Redshift can define two-dimensional (2D), three-dimensional (3DZ), two-dimensional with a measure (3DM), and four-dimensional (4D) geometry primitive data types:

For more information about geographic coordinate systems, see Geographic coordinate system and Spherical coordinate system in Wikipedia.

The GEOMETRY and GEOGRAPHY data types have the following subtypes:

There are Amazon Redshift SQL functions that support the following representations of geometric data:

You can cast between GEOMETRY and GEOGRAPHY data types.

The following SQL casts a linestring from a GEOMETRY to a GEOGRAPHY.

SELECT ST_AsEWKT(ST_GeomFromText('LINESTRING(110 40, 2 3, -10 80, -7 9)')::geography);

 st_asewkt
----------------------------------------------
 SRID=4326;LINESTRING(110 40,2 3,-10 80,-7 9)

The following SQL casts a linestring from a GEOGRAPHY to a GEOMETRY.

SELECT ST_AsEWKT(ST_GeogFromText('LINESTRING(110 40, 2 3, -10 80, -7 9)')::geometry);

 st_asewkt
----------------------------------------------
 SRID=4326;LINESTRING(110 40,2 3,-10 80,-7 9)

Amazon Redshift provides many SQL functions to query spatial data. Except for the ST_IsValid function, spatial functions that accept a GEOMETRY object as an argument expect this GEOMETRY object to be a valid geometry. If the GEOMETRY or GEOGRAPHY object isn't valid, then the behavior of the spatial function is undefined. For more information about validity, see Geometric validity.

For details about SQL functions to query spatial data, see Spatial functions.

For details about loading spatial data, see Loading a column of the GEOMETRY or GEOGRAPHY data type.