spec.md

Havasu Table Spec

This is a specification for the Havasu table format that extends Iceberg table spec to support managing large spatial datasets as tables.

Rationale

Havasu spec extends both version 1 and version 2 of Iceberg spec. This spec is not applicable to any future versions of Iceberg spec.

Havasu spec only defines data type mappings for Parquet. It does not define data type mappings for other formats such as Avro or ORC. We assume that the data files in Havasu tables are always stored in Parquet format.

Version

This is version 0.1.0 of the Havasu specification. The version of Havasu specification is stored in the table metadata of Havasu tables. Please refer to Table Metadata for more details.

Overview

Havasu extends Iceberg spec in the following ways:

• Primitive spatial data types: Havasu spec extends Iceberg spec to support spatial data types.
• Spatial transformation: Havasu spec extends Iceberg spec to support spatial transformation functions. These functions are used to partition or cluster spatial data.
• Spatial statistics: Havasu spec extends the Iceberg manifest files to support spatial statistics.
• Parquet data type mappings for spatial types: Havasu spec defines how to represent spatial types in Parquet files.

All other aspects of Iceberg spec are unchanged. For example, Havasu spec does not change the fundamental organization of table files.

Specification

Terms

• Geometry: A geometry is a spatial data type that represents a geometric shape. A geometry can be a point, a line, a polygon, or a collection of points, lines, or polygons. The geometry type conforms to the OGC Simple Features for SQL specification.
• Raster: A raster is a spatial data type that represents a grid of cells, as well as the geo-referencing information for aligning the cells to locations on the planet. Each cell in a raster contains a value. A raster may contain multiple grids (bands), all the grids should have the same cell data type and shape.
• MBR: A minimum bounding rectangle (MBR) is the smallest rectangle that contains a geometry or a raster. An MBR is defined by two points: the lower left corner and the upper right corner. We may use the term "bounding box" or "envelope" interchangeably with MBR.
• CRS: A coordinate reference system (CRS) is a coordinate-based local, regional or global system used to locate geographical entities. A CRS is usually defined by a coordinate system, a datum, and a set of transformations between different coordinate systems. A CRS should conform to ISO 19111:2019 and could be represented by a Well-known Text (WKT) string.

Primitive spatial data types

Havasu spec defines the following primitive spatial data types:

Primitive type	Description	Requirements
geometry	geometry shape	Conforming to the OGC Simple Features for SQL specification
raster	raster as matrices of pixels with geo-referencing metadata	The data model of rasters were introduced in section Raster data model

geometry fields in Havasu data files can have various physical types and encodings. The physical type and encoding of a geometry field is defined by the havasu.geometry-encoding property in the JSON representation of the field. Please refer to JSON serialization for the JSON representation of Havasu schemas.

Data models

Geometry data model

Geometry value consists of a optional spatial reference ID (abbreviated as SRID) and a geometry shape. The SRID is a 32-bit integer that identifies the coordinate system that the geometry shape is using. The interpretation of SRID is implementation dependent. For example, the SRID could be an EPSG code, or a code defined by a proprietary coordinate system.

The geometry shape is one of the following types defined by OGC Simple Features for SQL specification:

Geometry type	Description	Example in WKT
POINT	A point	POINT(1 1)
LINESTRING	A line	LINESTRING(1 1, 2 2)
POLYGON	A polygon	POLYGON((1 1, 2 1, 2 2, 1 2, 1 1))
MULTIPOINT	A collection of points	MULTIPOINT((1 1), (2 2))
MULTILINESTRING	A collection of lines	MULTILINESTRING((1 1, 2 2), (3 3, 4 4))
MULTIPOLYGON	A collection of polygons	MULTIPOLYGON(((1 1, 2 1, 2 2, 1 2, 1 1)), ((3 3, 4 3, 4 4, 3 4, 3 3)))
GEOMETRYCOLLECTION	A collection of geometries	GEOMETRYCOLLECTION(POINT(1 1), LINESTRING(1 1, 2 2))

The geometry shape can be encoded in various formats in data files. Please refer to Parquet data type mappings for the encoding of geometry values in Parquet files.

Raster data model

The raster data model of Havasu specification is largely inspired by the raster data type of PostGIS. A raster value is composed by the following components:

Field	Type	Description
width	int	The width of the raster in pixels
height	int	The height of the raster in pixels
crs	-	The coordinate reference system of the raster
scale_x	double	The scale factor of the raster in X direction
scale_y	double	The scale factor of the raster in Y direction
skew_x	double	The skew factor of the raster in X direction
skew_y	double	The skew factor of the raster in Y direction
upperleft_x	double	The X coordinate of the upper left corner of the raster
upperleft_y	double	The Y coordinate of the upper left corner of the raster
bands	array<struct>	The bands of the raster

A raster is one or more grids of cells. All the grids should have width rows and height columns. The grid cells are represented by the band field. The grids are geo-referenced using an affine transformation that maps the grid coordinates to world coordinates. The coordinate reference system (CRS) of the world coordinates is specified by the crs field. The CRS will be serialized as a WKT string when stored in data files.

The geo-referencing information is represented by the parameters of an affine transformation (upperleft_x, upperleft_y, scale_x, scale_y, skew_x, skew_y). Havasu specification only supports affine transformation as geo-referencing transformation, other transformations such as polynomial transformation are not supported.

The grid coordinates of a raster is always anchored at the center of grid cells. The translation factor of the affine transformation upperleft_x and upperleft_y also designates the world coordinate of the center of the upper left grid cell. Havasu specification only requires that the stored raster values in data files should follow this convention, but it does not require that the applications should expose raster values to the users in this convention. For example, SedonaDB exposes raster functions that follows the convention that the grid coordinates of a raster is anchored at the upper left corner of grid cells, which is consistent with GDAL and PostGIS.

Havasu supports persisting raster band values in two different ways:

• in-db: The band values are stored in the same data file as the geo-referencing information. The band values are stored in the bands field of the raster value.
• out-db: The band values are stored in files external to Havasu tables. The raster value stored in Havasu data file contains the geo-referencing information and URI of external raster files. The URI of external raster files are stored in the bands field of the raster value.

Havasu specification allows mixture of in-db and out-db bands in the same raster, and also allows different out-db bands of the same raster to be stored in different external files. However, the implementation of Havasu specification may not support all these cases.

The components of in-db band value is shown in the following table:

Field	Type	Description
pixel_type	enum	The type of pixel values
no_data_value	pixel_value_type	The value of no-data cells
data	array<pixel_value_type>	The value of cells

The pixel_type field is an enumeration that specifies the type of pixel values. The pixel types are defined as follows. pixel_type is stored as an integer in data files.

Pixel type	Description
PT_8BSI	Signed 8-bit integer
PT_8BUI	Unsigned 8-bit integer
PT_16BSI	Signed 16-bit integer
PT_16BUI	Unsigned 16-bit integer
PT_32BSI	Signed 32-bit integer
PT_32BUI	Unsigned 32-bit integer
PT_32BF	32-bit floating point
PT_64BF	64-bit floating point

The components of out-db band value is shown in the following table:

Field	Type	Description
pixel_type	enum	The type of pixel values
no_data_value	binary	The value of no-data cells
band_number	int	The 0-based index of the band in the external raster file
uri	string	The URI of the external raster file

Out-db band refers to one specific band indexed by band_number in the raster file referenced by uri. The raster file referenced by uri should be a valid raster file conforming to the following requirements:

• The raster should have a band indexed by band_number.
• The pixel type of the band should be the same as pixel_type.
• The CRS of the raster file should be equivalent with the CRS of the raster value.
• The affine transformation of the raster file should be aligned with the affine transformation of the raster value: the scale_x, scale_y, skew_x and skew_y parameters of both affine transformations should be the same.

The format of raster file is implementation dependent. For example, the raster file could be a Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) file.

Havasu specification defines how to stores raster values in parquet data files. The definition of parquet data type for raster is almost identical to the raster data model specified here. Please refer to Parquet data type mappings for the encoding of raster values in Parquet files.

Table Metadata

Havasu extends the table metadata by adding the following fields:

v1	v2	Field	Type	Description
optional	optional	havasu.format-version	string	The version of Havasu specification that the table conforms to

If havasu.format-version is not present in the table metadata, then the table conforms to Havasu version 0.1.0.

Manifests

Havasu spec extends the Iceberg manifest files to support spatial statistics. This section describe the changes to Iceberg manifest files.

Havasu inherits the same manifest file schema from Iceberg. The only difference is that the data_file struct in Havasu manifest files contain additional fields to store spatial statistics:

v1	v2	Field id, name	Type	Description
optional	optional	1250 geom_lower_bounds	map<1260: int, 1270: binary>	Lower bounds of geometry or raster values
optional	optional	1280 geom_upper_bounds	map<1290: int, 1300: binary>	Upper bounds of geometry or raster values

The boundings of geometry and raster values should be derived using the rules described in the next section.

Geometry bounds

The bounds of geometry values should be derived using their minimum bounding rectangles (MBRs). The MBR of a geometry value is defined as the smallest rectangle that contains the geometry value. The SRID of geometry values were ignored when computing the MBRs. The following pseudo-code shows how to compute the MBR of a geometry value:

min_x = min(x for x, y in geom)
min_y = min(y for x, y in geom)
max_x = max(x for x, y in geom)
max_y = max(y for x, y in geom)

The MBRs of all geometry values in a data file should be unioned as a single MBR, which is the MBR of the data file. The MBR of a data file is stored in the geom_lower_bounds and geom_upper_bounds fields of the manifest file. The lower-left corner of the MBR as a point geometry POINT (min_x min_y) should be binary-serialized as the lower bound of the geometry value, and the upper-right corner of the MBR POINT (max_x max_y) is serialized as the upper bound of the geometry value. Please refer to Single spatial value serialization for the serialization of geometry values.

Raster bounds

Raster bounds are MBRs of rasters in WGS84 coordinate system. They are computed by transforming the envelope of the raster in its native coordinate system to WGS84. The algorithm for transforming the envelopes is implementation dependent. However, there are some requirements for implementing the transformation algorithm:

1. The transformation algorithm should be able to handle the distortion of the envelope caused by the projection of the raster. The transformed envelope on WGS84 should be as inclusive as possible, which means that it covers most of the area covered by the original raster.
2. The transformation algorithm should be able to handle the case that the envelope of the raster covers the poles. The transformed envelope should span [-180, 180] in longitude in such cases.
3. The transformation algorithm should be able to handle the case that the envelope of the raster crosses the anti-meridian. The transformed envelope could span [-180, 180] in longitude, or produces a envelope crossing the anti-meridian described later in such cases.

Raster bounds have a special rule for handling MBRs crossing the anti-meridian. If the X coordinate of lower left corner of the MBR is greater than the X coordinate of the upper right corner of the MBR, then the MBR is considered as crossing the anti-meridian. The area covered by the MBR is made up of two parts: the part on the left side of the anti-meridian and the part on the right side of the anti-meridian. For example, an MBR with POINT (170, 10) as lower-left corner and POINT (-170, 20) as upper-right corner covers the area from POINT (170, 10) to POINT (180, 20) on the left side of the anti-meridian, and the area from POINT (-180, 10) to POINT (-170, 20) on the right side of the anti-meridian. Implementations of Havasu specification should be able to handle MBRs crossing the anti-meridian correctly, otherwise spatial query optimizations will derive incomplete query results.

The MBRs of all raster values in a data file should be unioned as a single MBR, which is the MBR of the data file. The MBR of a data file is stored in the geom_lower_bounds and geom_upper_bounds fields of the manifest file in the same way as geometry bounds.

Scan Planning

Applications can take advantage of the spatial statistics of data files to optimize the query execution plan. For example, if the query predicate is a spatial range query, the application can use the spatial statistics to prune the data files that do not contain any data that satisfies the query predicate. How spatial query optimization is implemented in scan planning is implementation dependent. One possible implementation is to convert the spatial query predicate to an inclusive projection. An inclusive projection is evaluated using the field statistics maintained in manifest files. If a spatial predicate matches at least one row in a data file, then the inclusive query predicate must match that data file. For example, for a spatial range query ST_Within(geom, Q), where geom is the geometry field in a Havasu table, Q is a constant geometry as the query window, the inclusive projection is ST_Intersects(MBR[geom], Q). MBR[geom] is the minimum bounding box of all values of geom in a data file. It can be derived from the lower and upper bounds of geom stored in geom_lower_bounds and geom_upper_bounds fields in the manifest file.

Similarly, for spatial range query ST_Contains(geom, Q), the inclusive projection could be ST_Contains(MBR[geom], Q). It is valid to use ST_Contains in this case because if geom contains Q, the MBR of all geom values must also contain Q. Although ST_Intersects(MBR[geom], Q) is also a valid inclusive projection, ST_Contains(MBR[geom], Q) is more appropriate because it is more selective.

For raster range queries, the application may need to transform the query window to WGS84 when converting the spatial predicate to an inclusive projection, since the statistics of raster values are always in WGS84.

JSON serialization

Schemas

Havasu extended the serialized representation of Iceberg schemas to support spatial data types. For the sake of compatibility with Iceberg table format, Havasu encodes spatial data types by adding special properties to the JSON representation of struct types.

Geometry

For geometry fields in a struct type, the type of geometry field should be the physical type of the serialized representation of geometry, it could be one of binary or string. An additional property havasu.geometry-encoding was added to the JSON representation of the field to indicate that it is a geometry field. The value of havasu.geometry-encoding field is the identifier of geometry serialization format.

For example, the following JSON schema defines a struct type with a geometry field named geom. The physical type of geom is binary, and the geometry stored in data files are encoded in EWKB format:

{
  "type": "struct",
  "fields": [
    {
      "id": 1,
      "name": "geom",
      "required": false,
      "type": "BINARY",
      "havasu.geometry-encoding": "ewkb"
    }
  ]
}

Valid values of havasu.geometry-encoding are:

Identifier	Description	Compatible physical types
ewkb	Extended Well-known binary (EWKB)	binary
wkb	Well-known binary (WKB)	binary
wkt	Well-known text (WKT)	string
geojson	GeoJSON	string

The value of havasu.geometry-encoding should be consistent with the encoding of geometry values in data files. For encoding of geometry values in parquet files, please refer to Parquet data type mappings.

Raster

For raster fields in a struct type, the type of raster field should be the JSON representation of an empty struct. An additional property havasu.raster-encoding was added to the JSON representation of the field to indicate that it is a raster field. The value of havasu.raster-encoding field is the identifier of raster serialization format. The only valid value of havasu.raster-encoding is v1.

For example, the following JSON schema defines a struct type with a raster field named rast:

{
  "type": "struct",
  "fields": [
    {
      "id": 1,
      "name": "rast",
      "required": false,
      "type": {
        "type": "struct",
        "fields": []
      },
      "havasu.raster-encoding": "v1"
    }
  ]
}

Parquet Data Type Mappings

Havasu specification defines how to represent spatial types in Parquet files. This section describes the Parquet data type mappings for spatial types.

Geometry

Geometry values are stored in parquet according to the encoding property havasu.geometry-encoding of geometry field. The following table shows the Parquet data type mappings for geometry values:

Encoding	Parquet physical type	Logical type	Description
ewkb	BINARY		Extended Well-known binary (EWKB)
wkb	BINARY		Well-known binary (WKB)
wkt	BINARY	UTF8	Well-known text (WKT)
geojson	BINARY	UTF8	GeoJSON (RFC 7946)

Extended Well-known binary (EWKB) does not have a formal specification. It is a superset of WKB (OGC SFA specification 1.2.1) that supports including the SRID value. Havasu specification requires that the EWKB values stored in Parquet files should be in the format defined hereby.

The binary format of EWKB is as follows:

[byteOrder] [wkbType] [SRID] [wkbValue]

The byteOrder and wkbValue portion is identical with the WKB specification. The wkbType is extended to support including an optional SRID value. If wkbType & 0x20000000 is non-zero, then the SRID portion is present, otherwise the SRID portion is not present and the EWKB is binary sequence is also in WKB.

The SRID value is a 32-bit integer that identifies the coordinate system that the geometry shape is using. It is encoded in the byte order specified by byteOrder.

When geometry column is at the root of the schema, and the geometry encoding is one of wkb and ewkb, the application can optionally write the GeoParquet metadata to the Parquet files. The GeoParquet metadata is defined by GeoParquet specification. Havasu data files written in this way are compatible with GeoParquet specification and can be directly consumed by GeoParquet readers.

Raster

The parquet data type for raster values is determined by the encoding property havasu.raster-encoding of raster field. The only version of raster encoding defined by Havasu specification is v1. Havasu spec may define new parquet data type for raster values in the future.

Raster values are stored in parquet as a group type with the following fields:

Field	Required or optional	Parquet physical type	Logical type	Description
width	required	INT32		The width of the raster in pixels
height	required	INT32		The height of the raster in pixels
num_bands	required	INT32		The number of bands in the raster
crs_wkt	optional	BINARY	UTF8	The Well-known Text (WKT) representation of coordinate reference system of the raster
geo_reference	required	group		The geo-referencing information of the raster
band_1	optional	group		The first band of the raster
band_2	optional	group		The second band of the raster
band_3	optional	group		The third band of the raster
band_4	optional	group		The fourth band of the raster
bands	optional	repeated group		The remaining bands of the raster

The group type of geo_reference field is defined as follows:

Field	Required or optional	Parquet physical type	Logical type	Description
scale_x	required	DOUBLE		The scale factor of the raster in X direction
scale_y	required	DOUBLE		The scale factor of the raster in Y direction
skew_x	required	DOUBLE		The skew factor of the raster in X direction
skew_y	required	DOUBLE		The skew factor of the raster in Y direction
upperleft_x	required	DOUBLE		The X coordinate of the upper left corner of the raster
upperleft_y	required	DOUBLE		The Y coordinate of the upper left corner of the raster

Bands of rasters are stored in the band_1, band_2, band_3, band_4 and bands fields. If a raster has less than 4 bands, then the extra band_N fields and the bands field should be null. If a raster has more than 4 bands, then band_1 to band_4 fields should be non-null and stores the band values of the first 4 bands, and the remaining bands should be stored in the bands field. The purpose of band_1 to band_4 fields is to allow applications to access one particular band of a raster without reading all the bands, it only works when the band being accessed is one of the first 4 bands.

If the application only accesses the metadata of the raster, such as ST_Metadata(rast) or ST_GeoReference(rast), then the application does not need to read the band_N fields as well as the bands field. Applying this projection push-down optimization to Havasu tables can significantly improve the performance of metadata-only queries for raster fields.

The group type of each band is defined as follows:

Field	Required or optional	Parquet physical type	Logical type	Description
pixel_type	required	INT32		The type of pixel values
no_data	optional	BINARY		The NODATA value
data	optional	BINARY		The value of cells
out_db_band_no	optional	INT32		The 0-based band number of out-db raster file
out_db_url	optional	BINARY	UTF8	The URI of the out-db raster file

The pixel_type field is an enumeration that specifies the type of pixel values. The pixel types are defined as follows.

Pixel type	Value	Description
PT_8BSI	3	Signed 8-bit integer
PT_8BUI	4	Unsigned 8-bit integer
PT_16BSI	5	Signed 16-bit integer
PT_16BUI	6	Unsigned 16-bit integer
PT_32BSI	7	Signed 32-bit integer
PT_32BUI	8	Unsigned 32-bit integer
PT_32BF	10	32-bit floating point
PT_64BF	11	64-bit floating point

The pixel data were serialized using the little-endian bit pattern of values. The number of bytes for each pixel is determined by the value of pixel_type. For PT_32BF and PT_64BF pixel values, the binary representation of pixel values are IEEE 754 compliant bit representation of the float or double values.

The no_data field is a binary value that represents the value of no-data cells. If the band does not have NO DATA value, then the no_data field should be null.

In-db and out-db bands share the same group type for band values. Here is the rule for determining whether a band is in-db or out-db:

• If data is non-null, then the band is in-db.
• Otherwise, the band is out-db. out_db_band_no and out_db_url must be non-null in this case.

In-db band

The data field is a binary value that represents the values of all cells in the band. The values of cells are stored in row-major order. The size of data field is width * height * pixel_size, where pixel_size is the size of a pixel value in bytes.

Out-db band

The out_db_band_no field corresponds to the band_number field in raster data model, and the out_db_url field corresponds to the uri field in raster data model.

Single spatial value serialization

Geometry

Binary single value serialization

This serialization scheme is for storing single values as individual binary values in the lower and upper bounds maps of manifest files. Binary serialized geometry values are always point values in practice. Geometry values are serialized as binary values by following the Well-known Binary (WKB) specification defined by Simple Feature Access – Part 1: Common Architecture.

JSON single value serialization

Havasu specification does not define how geometry values are serialized, so it is not possible to specify non-null initial-value or write-default values for geometry fields in Havasu schema. Initial values and write default values for geometry fields are rarely used in practice, so this limitation should not be a problem in most cases.

Raster

Havasu specification does not define how raster values are serialized, so it is not possible to specify non-null initial-value or write-default values for raster fields in Havasu schema. Initial values and write default values for raster fields are rarely used in practice, and there is no need to encode raster values in manifest files since the statistics of raster values are geometry values, so this limitation should not be a problem in most cases.