Posted On: Nov 21, 2019
With the addition of a new polymorphic data type, GEOMETRY, Amazon Redshift now provides the ability to natively process spatial data. This capability enables customers to store, retrieve, and process spatial data so you can enhance your business insights by integrating spatial data into your analytical queries.
The new data type supports multiple geometric shapes such as Point, Linestring, Polygon, MultiPoint, MultiLinestring, MultiPolygon, and GeometryCollection. Customers can add GEOMETRY columns to Redshift tables and write SQL queries spanning across spatial and non-spatial data. Redshift also adds over 40 new spatial SQL functions to construct geometric shapes, import, export, access and process the spatial data. With Redshift’s ability to seamlessly query data lakes, customers can now easily extend spatial processing to data lakes by integrating external tables in spatial queries.
The support for spatial data in Redshift is included with Redshift release version 1.0.11262 or later. This 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.