Looking for geospatial conferences in 2026? Here’s a growing community-maintained list: https://github.com/Nowosad/conferences_2026 🗺️ Add missing events via PR. #gischat #gis #geocomputation

Modern geospatial SQL means you can skip the parallelization etc that we try to do to actually get these types of runs to complete.

In 2024 I spent days trying to optimize a point-in-polygon join with ~130 million points against all U.S. zipcodes and the best I could come up with was a few minutes. In 2026, both SedonaDB and @duckdb.org spatial can both do it in seconds 🤯. More in the post! dewey.dunnington.ca/post/2026/wr...

We are thrilled to announce that Positron Server is now available for academic use via JupyterHub! This gives students a robust #RStats & #Python data science IDE without needing a local install or new infrastructure. Learn more: positron.posit.co/blog/posts/2...

We heard you: ADBC is great, but you need it on mainframes. Introducing ADBC for COBOL. The same connectors that work with Python, Rust, and Go now work with a language originally designed for punch cards. columnar.tech/blog/adbc-co...

Can your current spatial SQL engine ST_💩()? We didn't think so! As part of our ongoing attempt to innovate on spatial SQL in Apache Sedona, this we're proposing emoji shorthands for most functions which (1) improve expressiveness and (2) helps more SQL fit on one line.

Our list of 2026 #rstats and #python summer internships has been posted. We can't wait to work with you and make great things! tidyverse.org/blog/2026/03...

We have summer internships y'all! Come work at Posit on the PyData, tidymodels, shiny, or Connect teams: grnh.se/tigz810a3us. You will have an awesome time, learn a ton, and help advance our open source and pro tools 🧰 #rstats #pydata

I tend to be a CRAN-appreciator. But wow, R-Universe is such a useful project. As a developer, I can: - Experiment with new and creative approaches that would never get accepted on CRAN; - Have cross-platform binaries for my packages built within an hour (usually) of a GitHub push

The fastest operation is the one you don’t have to do. When a database natively supports @arrow.apache.org, ADBC can speed up fetching and ingestion by eliminating costly row/column conversions. How much faster is it in practice? We ran some benchmarks to find out. Link below 👇

Arctos Alliance (arctosalliance.org) is now officially launched! "If your organization depends on Arrow or Parquet or you’re interested in helping sustain these critical data technologies, we would welcome a conversation about how to get involved."

We're chuffed to announce Apache SedonaDB 0.3.0! This release features a rewritten join that supports larger-than-memory spatial/KNN joins courtesy of Kristin Cowalcijk, new functions, parameterized SQL queries, GDAL/pyogrio reads, GDAL/sf based reads in R, and the beginnings of an R DataFrame API!

📖 Apache Parquet recently added native support for Geospatial. This post explains what that means and why it is important: parquet.apache.org/blog/2026/02...

Great inaugural post about the geospatial types on the Parquet blog. Thank you Jia Yu, Dewey Dunnington , Kristin Cowalcijk, Feng Zhang. More posts coming ! parquet.apache.org/blog/2026/02...

Released this week: Version 22 of the ADBC libraries and drivers. This release includes updates to the ADBC libraries for 8 languages, and improvements to the 4 ADBC drivers that are maintained in the apache/arrow-adbc repository. See the blog for more details: arrow.apache.org/blog/2026/01...

Introducing gdalcli by Andrew Brown -- an R frontend to GDAL’s unified CLI (≥3.11) 🌐 Compose and execute GDAL workflows with pipe-friendly functions. Learn more: github.com/brownag/gdal... #RStats #GDAL #Geospatial #OpenSource #RSpatial

Apache SedonaDB 0.2.0 is now available. Download here: buff.ly/k9LRlyC SedonaDB is the first open source, single-node analytical database engine that treats spatial data as a first-class citizen. It is developed as a subproject of Apache Sedona. #opensource

Excited to announce SedonaDB 0.2.0! Highlights include reading spatial file formats via GDAL/OGR, improved GeoParquet IO, Python @arrow.apache.org UDFs, and 40+ additional functions.

Here are the slides and recordings from our Boston DataFusion Meetup in September: Youtube: youtu.be/wCAud478Dg8 Slides (pdf): drive.google.com/file/d/18KGH...

At FOSS4G Auckland 2025, we, MIERUNE Inc., had four talks about various topics from GTFS to GeoArrow. This is a quick summary of the presentation titles and the links to the slides🔗 dev.to/mierune/foss...

Wohoo, QGIS Arrow support has been merged: https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/pull/63749 Thanks @paleolimbot & @nyalld et al. Looking forward to testing it out soon 🤩 #qgis #arrow #gischat

Starring in a few minutes: It’s QGIS Open Day today! 🎉 Don’t miss our two awesome talks. Grab all links and info on the wiki: https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/wiki/QOD-November-2025 #qgis #gischat

I love this country

#30DayMapChallenege day 24: The Mud Lakes of Nova Scotia! Here I use the SedonaDB #Rstats bindings with ggspatial+utils for the cartography. The Nova Scotia boundary here is from Overture Maps "divisions" which works great in SedonaDB/R! dewey.dunnington.ca/post/2025/da...

Save the date -- Wednesday July 22, 2026 for the first Apache DataFusion meetup in Denver: luma.com/jsu6faie

I talked about GeoArrow at FOSS4G Auckland 2025! Here's my slides. GeoArrow on Web; Can We Live Without GeoJSON? yutannihilation.github.io/foss4g-2025-...

It was a joy today to present alongside fellow DataFusion contributors and users at the @apachedatafusion.bsky.social meetup in Boston! Slides from my talk are at dewey.dunnington.ca/slides/df2025 and hopefully the others will be posted soon!

Here is a nice examination of the benefits of building new systems using the extensibility of @apachedatafusion.bsky.social vs other systems. www.bauplanlabs.com/post/duck-hu...

Apache Arrow 22.0.0 is now available for download: buff.ly/rFyGsDV This release includes 213 resolved issues. #opensource

This @posit.co::conf(2025) talk is everything: "The geospatial suite for Arrow is relatively new...so this is a PSA that it exists and it's really powerful and impressive. I actually also found it very easy to use...and I didn't really have much trouble learning it" www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHyg...

RE: https://fosstodon.org/@underdarkGIS/113300727609804149 Over 250 #geospatial #gischat counts to follow: https://gist.github.com/anitagraser/a37118d74b839602e0f474375f548dfd

Day 6 of the #30DayMapChallenege is Dimensions! Here I create a beautiful space-time dataset with M values and a proper temporal CRS with SedonaDB...and then ignore it because I couldn't find a tool that can animate M values (let me know if there is one!). dewey.dunnington.ca/post/2025/da...

Day 5 of the #30DayMapChallenege! In which I attempt simple LiDAR processing for the first time using SedonaDB. Behold...a high-resolution elevation map of what's under my feet in my hometown of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Code + walk through included! dewey.dunnington.ca/post/2025/da...

Excited to be one of the attendees and present our work on the DataFusion-powered SedonaDB alongside a great lineup of talks! If you're in the Boston area come and say hi!

#30DayMapChallenge day three is polygons...here's a map I made for my Ph.D. thesis...a standard Fig 1 for lakes papers. This paper is about land use and how it is resolved in sediment, so I tried to communicate urban development in each catchment using very thin roads. This one is 100% QGIS!

#30DayMapChallenege day two is lines! Here's an animated version of the stream traversal with SedonaDB post I made a few weeks ago but using the Gaspereau River, which drains Gaspereau Lake (featured in day one). dewey.dunnington.ca/post/2025/da...

Day 1 of the #30DayMapChallenege is points! This one is entitled "Always Plot Your Test Data"...I've been using data called ns-water_point for a long time without properly inspecting it. It turns out the points are almost all rocks! They're pretty much all rocks. dewey.dunnington.ca/post/2025/da...

GeoArrow is undoubtedly a superior format to GeoJSON, yet GeoJSON remains the dominant standard in web browsers. I'm hoping we'll reach a point where using GeoArrow is just as easy and seamless as using GeoJSON. I hope my talk helps to figure out what's still missing in the ecosystem.

#30DayMapChallenge starts tomorrow: 30 days, 30 map ideas. If you’re using R, Python, or Julia, consider sharing open-source examples or tutorials. 🧭 30daymapchallenge.com #GeoData #DataViz #Maps #SpatialViz

New version of Rust Apache Arrow and Apache Parquet is out -- includes new new metadata parser, new avro reader, geometry and variant support 🤯 arrow.apache.org/blog/2025/10...

We're cooking up a lot of great stuff, check out our announcement to learn more. I've been really lucky to get to work on Arrow the last few years and even luckier to get to keep doing that!

We made Apache Parquet metadata parsing 3x-9x faster in the latest release of the Rust implementation arrow.apache.org/blog/2025/10...

Absolutely wonderful from @vickiboykis.com - newsletter.vickiboykis.com/archive/i-wa...

This week's Apache Sedona drop: lazy/selective GeoParquet reads in SedonaDB, @duckdb.org, GDAL, and GeoPandas! This is how querying a GeoParquet file plonked on a web server can be queried locally (and why GeoParquet can be even faster locally!) dewey.dunnington.ca/post/2025/la... #gischat

This in turn was due to @yutannihilation-en.bsky.social's fantastic work on Savvy (lightweight R bindings for Rust)!

Thanks to @paleolimbot.bsky.social's great work, the sedonadb R package is now also available to Windows via R-universe 🎉 I'm excited particularly because I believe sedonadb is the easiest tool for R users to access GeoParquet data. #rstats apache.r-universe.dev/sedonadb

Our new thrift parser in the Rust Apache Parquet implementation is a 🎁 that keeps on giving performance wise 🚀 github.com/apache/arrow... We are also working on a blog post that has a deeper explanation

Well deserved!