Magellan is a distributed execution engine for geospatial analytics on big data.
It is implemented on top of Apache Spark and deeply leverages modern database techniques like efficient data layout, code generation and query optimization in order to optimize geospatial queries.
In this blog, I will be talking about Magellan, geospatial analytics in general and areas of Spark SQL that we leverage in Magellan.
These topics should be of interest to end users who wish to perform scalable geospatial analytics, to developers who wish to extend Spark SQL to provide specialized libraries for query processing as well as dilettantes who like to understand the algorithms (both age old and state of the art) used in geospatial analytics.