Simple features

Builder supports simple features stored as geometry or geography in cloud data warehouses. These simple features are defined as a standard which specifies digital storage of geographical data, usually point, line or polygon, storing both spatial and non-spatial features.

This table shows the current type of simple features (geometry or geography) supported on each data warehouse:

	Geography	Geometry
BigQuery	✅	Not Supported
CARTO DW	✅	Not Supported
Redshift	Not Supported	✅
Snowflake	✅	Not Supported
PostgreSQL	Not Supported	✅
Databricks	✅ WKB Binaries	Not Supported

When working with simple features in Builder, ensure that your spatial column contains only a single type of geometry—either points, lines, or polygons. Mixing different geometry types within the same spatial column is not supported. To handle multiple geometry types, use separate sources for each type.

Visualizing simple features

Builder ensures performance experience when rendering simple features on a map as data is loaded progressively via vector tiles. The data for these tiles is extracted by pushing down SQL queries to the data warehouse, and they are requested as you zoom in and out or pan the map.

Note these queries in Builder are cached. To understand more how caching works and different methods to keep your data fleshed, check this link in our documentation.

Find more information about performance consideration for this data source type in this section.