No Map Required: Geospatial Analytics Directly in Your Data Warehouse

The February Ohio North Database Training user group meeting will be held on February 3rd, 2025 at 5:00PM. This will be a HYBRID event and we will be joined in person by David Pickering.

You're welcome to come meet in-person at our meeting location, the offices of Improving at

6000 Freedom Square Dr,
Unit 110,
Independence, OH 44131

Teams Link if anyone needs it after RSVP-ing for in person.

If you would like to subscribe to our email list outside of Meetup, we have changed platforms recently and you will need to register here in Kit instead to receive emails.

Agenda:

5:00 PM EST: Online and in-person meeting begins with a social hour. This is an unstructured hour where you can join us to catch up and meet other group members before the session starts. There will be food brought in for in-person attendees.

6:00 PM EST: Updates and announcements, followed by our feature presentation. See below for presentation details.

7:30 PM EST: Optionally after the main presentations, the in-person crowd may go out for snacks and drinks at a local establishment.

We hope to see you there!

Session Abstract
No Map Required: Geospatial Analytics Directly in Your Data Warehouse
Think geospatial analysis requires specialized GIS software? Think again. This session introduces you to shapefiles and spatial operations right inside your database—no mapping application required.

We'll demystify shapefiles (what they are, how they work, and where to get them) and show you how nearly every modern database —from DuckDB to Snowflake, supports spatial operations. You'll see practical demos covering spatial joins, distance calculations, and how to determine if two shapes interact with each other.

Whether you're a data engineer optimizing delivery routes, an analyst aggregating metrics by geography, or a BI developer building location-aware dashboards, this session will show you how to unlock powerful spatial capabilities already built into your database stack—no specialized tools required.

*Please note, that we will be using Microsoft Teams for the online portion of this meeting. You may want to join a few minutes early to ensure you do not have any issues. If you are attending in person, there are large TVs at the office, and you do not need to bring a laptop or use Teams.