Snowflake : Navigating Snowflake’s Geospatial Data Types: An In-Depth Exploration

Snowflake’s support for geospatial data types and functions allows users to store, manage, and analyze location-based data efficiently. Geospatial data is commonly used in various applications such as transportation, logistics, environmental monitoring, and urban planning. In this article, we will dive deep into Snowflake’s geospatial data types, explore their capabilities, and understand how they can be utilized effectively for your data management needs.

Understanding Geospatial Data Types in Snowflake

Snowflake natively supports two geospatial data types:

1. GEOGRAPHY: This data type represents a point, line, or polygon in two-dimensional space. It can be used to store and manipulate geometric shapes, such as points, lines, and polygons, in the context of Earth’s surface. The GEOGRAPHY data type uses the WGS 84 reference system (EPSG:4326), which is a widely adopted standard for representing geospatial data.
2. GEOGRAPHY_BINARY: This data type is similar to GEOGRAPHY, but it uses a more compact binary format for storage, which can lead to performance improvements for specific workloads. However, this format may not be as human-readable or interoperable with other systems as the standard GEOGRAPHY data type.

Working with Geospatial Data in Snowflake

To work with geospatial data in Snowflake, you need to:

1. Create tables with geospatial data types:

CREATE TABLE geo_locations (
    id INT,
    location GEOGRAPHY
);

INSERT INTO geo_locations (id, location)
VALUES (1, 'POINT(-122.419416 37.774929)'); -- WKT format

INSERT INTO geo_locations (id, location)
VALUES (2, FROM_HEX('0101000020E6100000C08B6CEB6C945EC0E16BF6990F8C4240')); -- WKB format

INSERT INTO geo_locations (id, location)
VALUES (3, '{
    "type": "Point",
    "coordinates": [-122.419416, 37.774929]
}'); -- GeoJSON format

-- Calculate the distance between two points
SELECT ST_Distance(
    ST_GeogFromText('POINT(-122.419416 37.774929)'), -- San Francisco
    ST_GeogFromText('POINT(-73.935242 40.730610)')  -- New York City
) AS distance_meters;