Spatial partitioning techniques in SpatialHadoop

SpatialHadoop is an extended MapReduce framework that supports global indexing that spatial partitions the data across machines providing orders of magnitude speedup, compared to traditional Hadoop. In this paper, we describe seven alternative partitioning techniques and experimentally study their effect on the quality of the generated index and the performance of range and spatial join queries. We found that using a 1% sample is enough to produce high quality partitions. Also, we found that the total area of partitions is a reasonable measure of the quality of indexes when running spatial join. This study will assist researchers in choosing a good spatial partitioning technique in distributed environments.