Posted On: Nov 24, 2021

Amazon Redshift support for GEOGRAPHY data type is now available for spatial analytics. GEOGRAPHY data type is used in queries requiring higher precision results for spatial data with geographic features that can be represented with a spheroid model of the Earth and referenced using latitude and longitude as spatial coordinate system.

With this announcement, Amazon Redshift can now support two major spatial data types - GEOMETRY and GEOGRAPHY to perform the vast majority of spatial analytics, opening-up support for many more third-party spatial and GIS applications. In addition to the GEOGRAPHY data type, Amazon Redshift also released support for new spatial functions such as: ST_Intersection, ST_Centroid, ST_Transform, and ST_IsRing

Geography support is now available in all commercial AWS Regions. Refer to the AWS Region Table for Amazon Redshift availability. For more information or to get started with Amazon Redshift spatial analytics, see the documentation or the tutorial.