---
title: "Geospatial data"
description: "Geospatial data represents locations and shapes on the Earth's surface — points, lines, and polygons with coordinates — and is queried with specialized spatial functions like distance, containment, and intersection."
canonical: "https://motherduck.com/glossary/geospatial-data/"
related:
  - title: "Mastering Geospatial Analysis with DuckDB Spatial and MotherDuck"
    url: "https://motherduck.com/blog/geospatial-for-beginner-duckdb-spatial-motherduck/"
  - title: "DuckLake Architecture Deep Dive: Catalog, Storage, Compute | MotherDuck"
    url: "https://motherduck.com/videos/ducklake-architecture-deep-dive/"
  - title: "DuckDB SQL | MotherDuck Docs"
    url: "https://motherduck.com/docs/sql-reference/duckdb-sql-reference/"
---

# Geospatial data

> Geospatial data represents locations and shapes on the Earth's surface — points, lines, and polygons with coordinates — and is queried with specialized spatial functions like distance, containment, and intersection.

## Overview

Geospatial data encodes real-world location and shape information: points (a single coordinate, like a store location), lines (a road or route), and polygons (a region, like a delivery zone or country boundary). Common file formats include GeoJSON, Shapefiles, and GeoPackage, and the standard in-database representation is the `GEOMETRY` type, following the Open Geospatial Consortium's "Simple Features" model. Spatial data usually also carries a coordinate reference system (CRS) describing how coordinates map to real-world positions (for example, WGS 84 / EPSG:4326 for standard latitude/longitude).

## Geospatial queries in DuckDB

DuckDB's `spatial` extension adds a `GEOMETRY` type and a large library of spatial functions and file format readers (Shapefile, GeoJSON, GeoPackage, and more via GDAL).

```sql
INSTALL spatial;
LOAD spatial;

SELECT name, geom
FROM ST_Read('stores.geojson');

SELECT s.name, c.name
FROM stores s
JOIN city_boundaries c
  ON ST_Within(s.geom, c.geom);

SELECT name, ST_Distance(geom, ST_Point(-122.42, 37.77)) AS distance
FROM stores
ORDER BY distance
LIMIT 10;
```

Common functions include `ST_Distance`, `ST_Within`, `ST_Intersects`, `ST_Area`, and `ST_AsText`, following naming conventions shared with PostGIS and other spatial databases, which makes spatial SQL fairly portable between systems.

## Why it matters

Geospatial analysis powers use cases like store-location and delivery-zone analysis, geofencing, mapping demographic or environmental data to regions, and routing. Being able to run spatial joins and distance calculations directly in SQL alongside ordinary business data — rather than exporting to a separate GIS tool — makes it much easier to combine "where" questions with the rest of an analytical workflow.