2025 FOSS4G NA | DuckDB + Rasters - Sina Kashuk
In this session from FOSS4G NA 2025, Sina Kashuk, co-founder of Fused, presents DuckDB + Rasters: High-Performance Geospatial Analytics with H3 Hexagons. Sina explores how to overcome the traditional challenges of joining raster and vector data by converting raster datasets into a uniform H3 hierarchical grid system, enabling high-speed analytics directly in the browser via DuckDB-Wasm.
The presentation features a live demonstration of "Fused Canvas," a serverless Python runtime that processes massive datasets—including CDL (Cropland Data Layer), DEM (Digital Elevation Model), and ERA5 climate data—on the fly. Sina showcases how "hexagonifying" data allows for complex spatial joins, real-time histogram updates, and petabyte-scale time-series analysis while bypassing the limitations of traditional cloud-optimized geotiffs. He also conducts a browser-based stress test, pulling 67 million records and nearly a gigabyte of data in seconds to demonstrate the power of parallelized, cloud-native parquet queries.
Highlights:
🛰️ Why H3? The benefits of a hierarchical hexagonal grid for uniform adjacency, efficient partitioning, and analytics near the poles
🔄 Raster-to-Hex Conversion: Transforming standard XYZ raster data into DuckDB-compatible rows where geometry is represented as a hex ID
🧩 Browser as Database: Using DuckDB-Wasm to perform real-time SQL queries on millions of spatial records directly within the user interface
⚙️ Fused Canvas: A look at the new serverless Python platform that allows for arbitrary code execution and dynamic tiling in the cloud
🌐 ERA5 at Scale: Navigating 75 years of climate data to visualize global warming patterns and temperature shifts using spatial-temporal partitioning
🏢 Overcoming WASM Limitations: How Fused manages range requests and virtual files to prevent unnecessary full-file downloads in the browser
🏗️ Stress Test Demo: Watch the system saturate network bandwidth by fetching 20 million records in 10 seconds using 30 parallel browser threads
For more content like this check out www.projectgeospatial.com
#Geospatial #FOSS4G #DuckDB #H3 #RasterData #BigData #CloudNative #DataScience #OpenSource #Python #ERA5 #Fused #ProjectGeospatial #Wasm #SpatialAnalytics
