DuckDB is probably the most important geospatial software of the last decade
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Re: DuckDB is probably the most important geospatial software of the last decade
#2I agree
Re: DuckDB is probably the most important geospatial software of the last decade
#3Ehh I tried to do some spatial stuff but there just wasn't enough there, or I could not figure out how to use it. Loading spatial information into ipython and fiddling with it is well-traveled and it doesn't seem to me that SQL is an inherently lower hurdle for the user.
Re: DuckDB is probably the most important geospatial software of the last decade
#4I’m not sure I agree that “install geospatial” is a game changer in simplicity compared to “pip install geopandas”.
They are both one line.
Re: DuckDB is probably the most important geospatial software of the last decade
#5Is it that much simpler than ‘load extension postgis’? I know geos and gdal have always kinda been a pain, but I feel like docker has abstracted it all away anyway. ‘docker pull postgis’ is pretty easy, granted I’m not familiar with what else duckdb offers.
Re: DuckDB is probably the most important geospatial software of the last decade
#6“import geopandas” also exists and has for some time. Snark aside, WHAT is special about duckDB? I wish the author had actually shown some practical examples so I could understand their claims better.
Re: DuckDB is probably the most important geospatial software of the last decade
#7DuckDB is a great thing for geospatial but most important of the past decade? There's so many tools in different categories it wouldnt come near top for me. Some might be QGIS, postGIS (still the standard), ArcGIS online (still the standard), JS mapping tools like mapbox (i prefer deckgl), new data types like COG, geopackage and geoparquet, photogrammetry tools, 3d tiles, core libraries like gdal and now pdal, shapely, etc.
Re: DuckDB is probably the most important geospatial software of the last decade
#8I'm a big fan of DuckDB and I do geospatial analysis, mostly around partitioning geographies (into Uber H3 hexagons), calculating Haversine distances, calculating areas of geometries, figuring out which geometry a point falls in, etc. Many of these features have existed in some form or other in geopandas or postgis, so DuckDB's spatial extensions bring nothing new.
But what DuckDB as an engine does is it lets me work directly on parquet/geoparquet files at scale (vectorized and parallelized) on my local desktop. It beats geopandas in that respect. It's a quality of life improvement to say the least.
DuckDB also has an extension architecture that admits more exotic geospatial features like Hilbert curves, Uber H3 support.
https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/extensions/spatial/functions....
Re: DuckDB is probably the most important geospatial software of the last decade
#9Honestly, I think it's actually https://www.uber.com/en-CA/blog/h3/
Re: DuckDB is probably the most important geospatial software of the last decade
#10We need a "come on" clause for these absurd headlines. Come on.