Spatial Data Management in Apache Spark: the GeoSpark Perspective and Beyond

Abstract

The paper presents the details of designing and developing GEOSPARK, which extends the core engine of Apache Spark and SparkSQL to support spatial data types, indexes, and geometrical operations at scale. The paper also gives a detailed analysis of the technical challenges and opportunities of extending Apache Spark to support state-of-the-art spatial data partitioning techniques: uniform grid, R-tree, Quad-Tree, and KDB-Tree. The paper also shows how building local spatial indexes, e.g., R-Tree or Quad-Tree, on each Spark data partition can speed up the local computation and hence decrease the overall runtime of the spatial analytics program. Furthermore, the paper introduces a comprehensive experiment analysis that surveys and experimentally evaluates the performance of running de-facto spatial operations like spatial range, spatial K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), and spatial join queries in the Apache Spark ecosystem. Extensive experiments on real spatial datasets show that GEOSPARK achieves up to two orders of magnitude faster run time performance than existing Hadoop-based systems and up to an order of magnitude faster performance than Spark-based systems.