Amazon Redshift announces support for two new geospatial H3 Indexing functions

Amazon Redshift extends support for Hexagonal Hierarchical Geospatial Indexing System, H3 for short, by adding two new H3 functions to Amazon Redshift’s previously announced H3 Indexing support in February 2024. H3 Indexing increases the performance of spatial queries at scale since the location information is pre-indexed. See this Amazon Big Data Blog on Amazon Redshift H3 Indexing for more information on the benefits and use-cases of H3 Indexing.

H3_Center returns the centroid of an H3 cell ID from an input index, which can be used to compute the geometric center of an arbitrary area that can be represented by H3 indexed cells, for example by finding the H3 cell with the smallest average distance to all other cells in the set representing the arbitrary area. While, H3_Boundary returns the boundary of an H3 cell ID from an input index.

With this announcement, Amazon Redshift now supports two new H3 Indexing related spatial functions: H3_Center, H3_Boundary, which are now available in all AWS regions where Amazon Redshift is available.

For more information or to get started with Amazon Redshift spatial analytics, see the documentation and the tutorial.