SpatialHadoop: A MapReduce framework for spatial data

This paper describes SpatialHadoop; a full-fledged MapReduce framework with native support for spatial data. SpatialHadoop is a comprehensive extension to Hadoop that injects spatial data awareness in each Hadoop layer, namely, the language, storage, MapReduce, and operations layers. In the language layer, SpatialHadoop adds a simple and expressive high level language for spatial data types and operations. In the storage layer, SpatialHadoop adapts traditional spatial index structures, Grid, R-tree and R+-tree, to form a two-level spatial index. SpatialHadoop enriches the MapReduce layer by two new components, SpatialFileSplitter and SpatialRecordReader, for efficient and scalable spatial data processing. In the operations layer, SpatialHadoop is already equipped with a dozen of operations, including range query, kNN, and spatial join. Other spatial operations are also implemented following a similar approach. Extensive experiments on real system prototype and real datasets show that SpatialHadoop achieves orders of magnitude better performance than Hadoop for spatial data processing.