A grid is a way of dividing the surface of the earth into contiguous cells with no gaps in between. This makes grids particularly useful for spatial indexing and aggregating.
Location Intelligence SDK for Big Data provides Spark SQL user defined functions (UDF) for hashing that allow you to manage grid cells for a variety of use cases. Hashing is a way of encoding and decoding the grid cell using the cell boundary and a unique identifier.
- rectangular (geohash)
- hexagon (hexagon hash)
- square (square hash)
Square hash is like GeoHash but has the advantage that when displayed in Popular Mercator, the cells appear as squares.
Hexagons are often used in telecommunication solutions as they approximate circles while covering the surface of the earth without gaps.
The following Grid index functions are available: