Why use Spatial Indexes?
H3, Quadbin and S2, offer unparalleled performance and analysis gains over traditional GIS approaches. Whether you are a telecoms, quick commerce, logistics or remote-sensing company, leverage the benefits of spatial indexes for large-scale data processing, aggregation and analytics.
Key benefits of Spatial Indexes
Efficiency
Analytics are faster and more computationally efficient.
Flexibility
Combine datasets into one layer for ease of comparison and analysis.
Objectivity
Remove bias associated with administrative geographies.
Impact
Visually more impactful and much easier to understand.
How are organizations benefiting from Spatial Indexes?
Companies that generate large amounts of location data, such as GPS tracks, telemetry, remote sensing or customer transactions are overcoming both operational and analytical limitations by shifting to a more efficient geospatial analysis approach with Spatial Indexes.
To evaluate business critical performance indicators such as delivery delays and errors.
To optimize routings, delivery times and better manage fleets.
To process and analyze massive network performance data volumes and generate unique customer usage insights.
To overcome the processing limitations and costs associated with handling and visualizing large raster datasets.
To optimize high volume marketing campaigns by locating customers & prospects, and understanding temporal patterns.
Cloud-native support for Spatial Indexes
CARTO’s Location Intelligence platform unlocks Spatial Indexes on the most popular cloud data warehouses including Google BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift and Databricks. Eliminate ETL complexity and any limits on data scalability.
Use efficient SQL statements for analysis with Spatial Indexes, harnessing the true power of the cloud data warehouse.


Spatial Indexes across the CARTO platform
From visualizing large datasets using Spatial Indexes in our Builder tool, to running more advanced analytical functions with Spatial SQL – CARTO enables analytics at scale without the need for complex geometries, across our whole platform.
Advanced spatial analysis features
Our Analytics Toolbox opens up analysis with H3 and other Spatial Indexes, including Quadkey and S2, through simple user-defined functions (UDFs). Ready-to-use on the CARTO platform, or directly through cloud provider consoles. With Workflows you can also visually design, run and share Spatial Index analysis using our no-code analytics automation tool.
Enrich grids with 1000s of spatial variables
Through our Data Observatory, CARTO users now have access to more than 12,000 spatial datasets that can be used for H3 & Quadbin aggregation and enrichment, including demographic, human mobility, behavioral, and climate variables.