Spatial Indexes

Regular B-Tree indexes are 1-dimensional indexes. They're efficient to hold data that are just single values.

Spatial values are multi-dimensional values. Meaning each value has multiple dimensions such as x and y co-ordinates in a 2D space. This is where spatial indexes come into the picture.

Spatial index data structures

Spatial index data structures efficiently stores the data itself in it.

It's stored in such a way that searching for a value in a space becomes easy. This is exactly also what vector databases do.

Real life use cases

• Geographical data such as locations, maps, and GPS coordinates.
• Uber uses it's own spatial index called H3 to store the location data of the drivers and riders.