Analytics for the Internet of Things (IoT)

Storing geospatial data in HDFS

HDFS and Hive do not natively support spatial data types. All is not lost, though, as HDFS can store any type of file, including geospatial files. Geometry can be stored in string (WKT) and binary (WKB) forms. They can be converted using code upon retrieval. Hive tables are schema-on-read and support User Defined Functions (UDF). A UDF can be created to interpret geospatial data.

In fact, there are some open source projects that do just that. One is called SpatialHadoop and can be found at http://spatialhadoop.cs.umn.edu/index.html. Another is called spatial-framework-for-hadoop and can be found on GitHub (https://github.com/Esri/spatial-framework-for-hadoop). The downside is that these projects are not fully ...