Amazon Redshift announces spatial functionality enhancements
Amazon Redshift launched native spatial data processing support in November 2019, with a polymorphic data type GEOMETRY, and more than 40 SQL spatial functions. This capability enables you to store, retrieve, and process spatial data so you can enhance your business insights by integrating spatial data into your analytical queries. Now, Amazon Redshift supports over 30 new spatial functions such as validation, simplification of geometries, new spatial relationships like "Crosses" and "ContainsProperly". Furthermore, Amazon Redshift enhanced the spatial functionality with multiple capabilities such as ODBC/JDBC support for GEOMETRY data, support for importing spatial data in Shapefile format, and spatial join performance improvements.
Spatial data can now be ingested from shapefiles’s stored on Amazon S3 by using the COPY command. Large geometries can be simplified on ingestion time. The JDBC/ODBC driver support for the GEOMETRY datatype enables seamless connection to a spatial ecosystem, and customer and partner applications can natively consume spatial data now. New spatial predicates and functions enrich the spatial feature set and performance optimizations enable customers to dive deeper into advanced spatial analytics with Amazon Redshift.
Amazon Redshift spatial data processing functionality is available to new and existing customers at no additional cost. To get started and learn more, visit our documentation. Refer to the AWS Region Table for Amazon Redshift availability.