What is a geospatial query? - Amazon Athena
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What is a geospatial query?

Geospatial queries are specialized types of SQL queries supported in Athena. They differ from non-spatial SQL queries in the following ways:

  • Using the following specialized geometry data types: point, line, multiline, polygon, and multipolygon.

  • Expressing relationships between geometry data types, such as distance, equals, crosses, touches, overlaps, disjoint, and others.

Using geospatial queries in Athena, you can run these and other similar operations:

  • Find the distance between two points.

  • Check whether one area (polygon) contains another.

  • Check whether one line crosses or touches another line or polygon.

For example, to obtain a point geometry data type from values of type double for the geographic coordinates of Mount Rainier in Athena, use the ST_Point (longitude, latitude) geospatial function, as in the following example. 

ST_Point(-121.7602, 46.8527)