alt Hacker NewsAuthor here: the beauty of DuckDB spatial is that the projections and CRS options are hidden until you need them. For 90% of geospatial data usage people don't and shouldn't need to know about projections or CRS.
Yes, there are so many great tools to handle the complexity for the capital-G Geospatial work.
I love Felt too! Sam and team have built a great platform. But lots of times a map isn't needed; an analyst just needs it as a column.
PostGIS is also excellent! But having to start up a database server to work with data doesn't lend itself to casual usage.
The beauty of DuckDB is that it's there in a moment and in reach for data generalists.
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I think we're mostly making the same point about complexity, ya.
To me, I think it's mostly a frontend problem stopping the spread of mapping in consumer apps. Backend geo is easy tbh. There is so much good, free tooling. Mapping frontend is hell and there is no good off the shelf solution I've seen. Some too low level, some too high level. I think we need a GIS-lite that is embeddable to hide the complexity and let app developers focus on their value add, and not paying the tax of having frontend developers fix endless issues with maps they don't understand.
edit: to clarify, I think there's a relationship between getting mapping valued by leadership such that the geo work can be even be done by analysts, and having more mapping tools exist in frontend apps such that those leaders see them and understand why geo matters. it needs to be more than just markers on the map, with broad exposure. hence my focus on frontend web. sorry if that felt disjointed
My experience has been that data generalists should stay away from geospatial analysis precisely because they lack a full appreciation of the importance of spatial references. I've seen people fail at this task in so many ways. From "I don't need a library to reproject, I'll just use a haversine function" to "I'll just do a spatial join of these address points in WGS84 to these parcels in NAD27" to "these North Korean missiles aren't a threat because according to this map using a Mercator projection, we are out of range."
DuckDB is great, but the fact that it makes it easier for data generalists to make mistakes with geospatial data is mark against it, not in its favor.