Geospatial Datatypes and Functions in the Most Popular Databases Survey

[ar-chad]

Bellow is the result of my survey of geospatial databases, discussed on 08/01/2025 WG meeting, in a form of links to lists of the geo and spatial datatypes and functions supported by the most known databases of this kind. There is too many of them to put on a list here.

Maybe such list of datatypes and functions could be compiled based on those sources in the future and used for benchmarks of geospatial databases. At first glance, it looks like there are still 2D and 3D functions present in those databases and not in GeoSPARQL yet.

• PostGIS
  http://postgis.net/docs/manual-3.5/PostGIS_Special_Functions_Index.html

• SpatiaLite
  https://www.gaia-gis.it/gaia-sins/spatialite-sql-latest.html#p4

• Oracle® Spatial
  https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/21/spatl/index.html

• H2GIS
  http://www.h2gis.org/docs/1.5.0/home/

• MariaDB
  https://mariadb.com/kb/en/geographic-geometric-features/
  https://mariadb.com/kb/en/geographic-functions/

• Snowflake
  https://docs.snowflake.com/en/sql-reference/data-types-geospatial
  https://docs.snowflake.com/en/sql-reference/functions-geospatial

There are also other well known databases with geospatial support, but not easy to find online documentation:

• Teradata Vantage
• Microsoft SQL Server
• SAN HANA

[situx]

I think it would be great if we had a table that would compare the functions that are implemented in the databases, similarly to table F.3 in the GeoSPARQL 1.1 standard.
Then we could filter out common functions in all databases which are probably also the one's we might want to define for GeoSPARQL

[ar-chad]

OK, I'll work on this.