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Known Limitations

GeoBrix Beta has some known limitations that will be addressed in future releases.

Databricks Spatial Types​

Current State​

The Beta does not yet support Databricks Spatial Types directly but is standardized to WKB or WKT where geometries are involved.

Workaround​

Convert GeoBrix output to Databricks types:

Convert to Databricks GEOMETRY Type
from pyspark.sql.functions import expr

# Read with GeoBrix
df = spark.read.format("shapefile_ogr").load("/Volumes/main/default/geobrix_samples/geobrix-examples/nyc/subway/nyc_subway.shp.zip")

# Convert to Databricks built-in GEOMETRY type
geometry_df = df.select(
    "*",
    expr("st_geomfromwkb(geom_0)").alias("geometry")
)

# Now use built-in ST functions
result = geometry_df.select(
    "geometry",
    expr("st_area(geometry)").alias("area")
)
result.limit(5).show()
Example output
+------------------------------+-----+
|geometry                      |area |
+------------------------------+-----+
|SRID=4326;POINT (-73.99 40.73)|0.0  |
|SRID=4326;POINT (-73.98 40.75)|0.0  |
|...                           |...  |
+------------------------------+-----+

Function Availability​

A handful of functions from DBLabs Mosaic are not yet ported:

RasterX​

  • rst_dtmfromgeoms - Digital Terrain Model from geometries

VectorX​

  • st_interpolateelevation - Interpolate elevation values
  • st_triangulate - Triangulation operations

GridX​

  • Custom Gridding - Not fully ported

Spatial KNN​

Spatial K-Nearest Neighbors is not yet ported:

  • No KNN operations currently available
  • H3 support for Geometry-based K-Ring and K-Loop not included

Compute Requirements​

GeoBrix requires Databricks Classic Clusters:

  • Not currently compatible with Serverless compute
  • Requires GDAL native libraries via init script, which are currently only supported on classic clusters

Databricks Runtime:

  • Minimum: DBR 17.1 (recommend DBR 17.3 LTS or later)
  • GeoBrix is designed to work with Databricks product spatial functions (available DBR 17.1+)

Format Support​

  • OGR - focus is on named vector readers in GDAL's OGR package.
  • GDAL - focus is on GeoTiff (named raster reader).
  • Advanced features of some formats may have limited support.

Next Steps​