Agreed that the polars interface is far superior to SQL! There are a few ways to do this if there's interest...polars wasn't an option because we needed Arrow extension types (https://github.com/pola-rs/polars/issues/9112).

It's built on a separate stack but conceptually it's very similar (DataFusion shares a number of idioms with Spark and has a number of projects implementing various Spark compatibility)...I think the idea was to bring the successful pieces of Sedona Spark to a wider audience.

Currently, lazier GeoParquet reads, a K-nearest neigbours join, Coordinate Reference System tracking, and built-in GeoPandas IO. These aren't things that DuckDB spatial can't or won't do, but they are things that DuckDB hasn't prioritized over the last year that are essential to a lot of spatial pipelines.

SedonaDB can decode PROJJSON and authority:code CRSes at the moment, although the underlying representation is just a string. In this case you might want something like CZBOND:999 or

{ "type": "EngineeringCRS", "name": "Fish, Towel, Mouse", "datum": {"name": "Wet Kitty + Mouse In Peril"}, "coordinate_system": { "subtype": "Cartesian", "axis": [ {"name": "Fish", "abbreviation": "F", "direction": "east"}, {"name": "Towel", "abbreviation": "T", "direction": "north"}, {"name": "Mouse", "abbreviation": "M", "direction": "up"}, ] } }

(Subject to the limitations of PROJJSON, such as a 4D CRS having a temporal axis and a limited set of acceptable "direction" values)

Baller references and customization. Thank you for taking the time to craft that, I really appreciate it. Looking now because that was a main requirement of mine)

PostGIS is great when your data is already in a Postgres table! SedonaDB and DuckDB are much faster when your data starts elsewhere (e.g., GeoParquet files).

The "DuckDB is probably the most important geospatial software of the last decade" post has a nice related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43881468

Oh I see. So if you have some kind of a pipeline in which you don’t need or want to load the data into a DB first. That makes total sense, thanks!