What is HP Vertica Place and what are some of its features?

In creating actionable analytics to inform better business decisions, the collected data often concerns the aspects of “who” and “what.” HP Vertica Place is geospatial functionality that will help to support collection and analysis of geospatial information to add the aspect of “where.” HP Vertica Place adds the ability to store and query geometric objects that are analogous to real-world entities. For example, people, properties, and locations are analogous to geometric points, while regions are analogous to polygons.

Along with functionality for measuring distance, length, and area, and other spatial functions, HP Vertica Place is optimized, through the use of spatial indexes and other techniques, for finding the intersections of points and polygons at scale.  In business-user terms, this means that Place is tuned specifically for finding when objects are within particular regions; for example, when people are within a certain distance of a store; or when properties are within a particular neighborhood or other type of defined region, such as a catastrophe zone or section of a store.

HP Vertica Place leverages the performance and scale of the underlying HP Vertica Analytics Platform. It supports established and de-facto standards through a data loader for the well-known ESRI-format shapefiles, data representation in the Open Geospatial Consortium’s (OGC) Well-Known Text (WKT) and Well-Known Binary (WKB) formats, and many OGC-based SQL functions for computation on two-dimensional planar data for several geometric shapes, with select support for spherical functions as well.