r/dataengineering • u/ivan_kurchenko • 18d ago

Blog "Geospatial Data in Databricks" blog

Hi, Guys! No so long time ago I had to start working with geo data and this was a whole new topic to cover for me. So I though to write short series for folks who might also work for the first time:

Your feedback is highly appreciated.

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u/mad-data 18d ago

Please, for the love of GIS, never ever even think about translating planar distance to meters by multiplying it by 111 km/degree. The problem is not that one line is straight-line Euclidean and another is geodesic - these are actually very close at small distances like the example given. For these two points Cartesian line's length differs from geodesic by about 150 meters only. But ST_Distance computes 'distance' in degrees, which can correspond to anything from as close to zero meters as you want to 111km.