Considerations when using spatial data with Amazon Redshift - Amazon Redshift

Amazon Redshift will no longer support the creation of new Python UDFs starting November 1, 2025. If you would like to use Python UDFs, create the UDFs prior to that date. Existing Python UDFs will continue to function as normal. For more information, see the blog post .

Considerations when using spatial data with Amazon Redshift

The following are considerations when using spatial data with Amazon Redshift:

  • The maximum size of a GEOMETRY or GEOGRAPHY object is 1,048,447 bytes.

  • Amazon Redshift Spectrum doesn't natively support spatial data. Therefore, you can't create or alter an external table with a GEOMETRY or GEOGRAPHY column.

  • Data types for Python user-defined functions (UDFs) don't support the GEOMETRY or GEOGRAPHY data type.

  • You can't use a GEOMETRY or GEOGRAPHY column as a sort key or a distribution key for an Amazon Redshift table.

  • You can't use GEOMETRY or GEOGRAPHY columns in SQL ORDER BY, GROUP BY, or DISTINCT clauses.

  • You can't use GEOMETRY or GEOGRAPHY columns in many SQL functions.

  • You can't perform an UNLOAD operation on GEOMETRY or GEOGRAPHY columns into every format. You can UNLOAD GEOMETRY or GEOGRAPHY columns to text or comma-separated value (CSV) files. Doing this writes GEOMETRY or GEOGRAPHY data in hexadecimal EWKB format. If the size of the EWKB data is more than 4 MB, then a warning occurs because the data can't later be loaded into a table.

  • The supported compression encoding of GEOMETRY or GEOGRAPHY data is RAW.

  • When using JDBC or ODBC drivers, use customized type mappings. In this case, the client application must have information on which parameters of a ResultSet object are GEOMETRY or GEOGRAPHY objects. The ResultSetMetadata operation returns type VARCHAR.

  • To copy geographic date from a SHAPEFILE, first ingest into a GEOMETRY column, and then cast the objects to GEOGRAPHY objects. .

The following nonspatial functions can accept an input of type GEOMETRY or GEOGRAPHY, or columns of type GEOMETRY or GEOGRAPHY:

  • The aggregate function COUNT

  • The conditional expressions COALESCE and NVL

  • CASE expressions

  • The default encoding for GEOMETRY and GEOGRAPHY is RAW. For more information, see Compression encodings.