Cloudera Docs

Geospatial limitations

Native geospatial query acceleration in Impala includes predicate pushdown limitations and specific functional constraints.

To get the best results from native geospatial query acceleration, you must consider the following constraints:

Pushdown scope

  • Supported pushdown – Predicate pushdown is supported only for queries that use separate latitude and longitude columns.
  • Unsupported pushdown – Pushing down predicates to columns that encode a geometry as a single binary is not currently supported.

Functional behavior

  • NULL handling – Native functions return NULL when they receive a NULL parameter. In contrast, Java-based functions return an error in this scenario.
  • SRID matching – The native implementation of the st_envIntersects() function does not check for a matching Spatial Reference Identifier (SRID).