Amazon Redshift support for Hexagonal Hierarchical Geospatial Indexing System, H3 for short, offers an easy way to index spatial coordinates into a hexagonal grid, down to a square meter resolution. Indexed data can be quickly joined across different datasets and aggregated at different levels of precision. H3 enables several spatial algorithms and optimizations based on the hexagonal grid, including nearest neighbors, shortest path, gradient smoothing, and more. H3 Indexing and related H3 spatial functions are now available for Amazon Redshift spatial analytics.

With this announcement, Amazon Redshift can now support more spatial analytics use-cases that use H3 indexing for geospatial functions. In addition to H3 Indexing, Amazon Redshift also released support for two new spatial functions: ST_GeoSquare and ST_GeomFromGeoSquare, which are used for recursively sub-dividing a region into smaller and smaller sub-regions or ‘geosquares’, which help in optimizing advanced proximity searches and spatial join queries.ENnbsp;

Support for the three new H3 Indexing related spatial functions: H3_FromLongLat, H3_FromPoint ENamp; H3_PolyFill functions, together with support for geosquares related spatial functions is now available in all commercial AWS Regions. For more information or to get started with Amazon Redshift spatial analytics, see the documentationENnbsp;and the tutorial.ENnbsp;