No. QGIS is.
Good god.
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
#22Is 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.
Yes. The difference between provisioning a server and running 'install spatial' in a CLI is night and day.
Docker has been a big improvement (when I was first learning PostGIS, the amount of time I had to hunt for proj directories or compile software just to install the plugin was a major hurdle), but it's many steps away from:
``` $ duckdb D install spatial; ```
Re: DuckDB is probably the most important geospatial software of the last decade
#23No. QGIS is. Good god.
Author here.
QGIS is amazing. It's really great. It also came out in 2002, so I think the headline is safe.
Re: DuckDB is probably the most important geospatial software of the last decade
#24DuckDB 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, shapel…
Most of those tools came out circa ~2000.
Yeah, I feel old.
Re: DuckDB is probably the most important geospatial software of the last decade
#25I work on geospatial apps and the software I think I am most excited about is https://felt.com/ . I want to see them expand their tooling such that maps and data source authentication/authorization was controllable by the developer, to enable tenant isolation with proprietary data access. They could really disrupt how geospatial tech gets integrated into consumer apps. This article doesn't acknowledge how niche this…
Author here: the beauty of DuckDB spatial is that the projections and CRS options are hidden until you need them. For 90% of geospatial data usage people don't and shouldn't need to know about projections or CRS. Yes, there are so many great tools to handle the complexity for the capital-G Geospatial work. I love Felt too! Sam and team have built a great platform. But lots of times a map isn't needed; an analyst just…
I think we're mostly making the same point about complexity, ya.
To me, I think it's mostly a frontend problem stopping the spread of mapping in consumer apps. Backend geo is easy tbh. There is so much good, free tooling. Mapping frontend is hell and there is no good off the shelf solution I've seen. Some too low level, some too high level. I think we need a GIS-lite that is embeddable to hide the complexity and let app developers focus on their value add, and not paying the tax of having frontend developers fix endless issues with maps they don't understand.
edit: to clarify, I think there's a relationship between getting mapping valued by leadership such that the geo work can be even be done by analysts, and having more mapping tools exist in frontend apps such that those leaders see them and understand why geo matters. it needs to be more than just markers on the map, with broad exposure. hence my focus on frontend web. sorry if that felt disjointed
Re: DuckDB is probably the most important geospatial software of the last decade
#26“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.
I've been researching DuckDB - while it has many technical merits I think the main argument will be ease of use. It has a lot of the operational advantages of sqlite paired with strong extensibility and good succinct documentation.
Folks who have been doing DevOps work are exasperated with crummy SaaS vendors or antiquated OSS options that have a high setup cost. DuckDB is just a mature project that offers an alternative, hence an easy fan favorite among hobbyists (I imagine at scale the opportunity costs change and it becomes less attractive).
Re: DuckDB is probably the most important geospatial software of the last decade
#27Is 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.
It is not simpler. I use it with testcontainers in the notebooks usually https://testcontainers-python.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Re: DuckDB is probably the most important geospatial software of the last decade
#28“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.
I replied to another comment, but I think a big part is that duckdbs spatial extension provides a SQL interface to a whole suite of standard foss gis packages by statically bundling everything (including inlining the default PROJ database of coordinate projection systems into the binary) and providing it for multiple platforms (including WASM). I.E there are no transitive dependencies except libc.
Yes, DuckDB does a whole lot more, vectorized larger-than-memory execution, columnar compressed storage and a ecosystem of other extensions that make it more than the sum of its parts. But while Ive been working hard on making the spatial extension more performant and more broadly useful (I designdd a new geometry engine this year, and spatial join optimization just got merged on the dev-branch), the fact that you can e.g. convert too and from a myriad of different geospatial formats by utilizing GDAL, transforming through SQL, or pulling down the latest overture dump without having the whole workflow break just cause you updated QGIS has probably been the main killer feature for a lot of the early adopters.
(Discmaimer, I work on duckdb-spatial @ duckdblabs)
Re: DuckDB is probably the most important geospatial software of the last decade
#29“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.
Everything is special about DuckDB. Pandas is way, way behind the state of the art in tabular data analysis.
Re: DuckDB is probably the most important geospatial software of the last decade
#30“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.
For one it doesn't have the god awful pandas API.