DuckDB 1.5 with spatial updates

DuckDB 1.5 arrives with significant updates for #geospatial: GEOMETRY becomes a built-in data type, storage switches to #WKB with shredding for better compression, #CRS awareness is now part of the type system, and more! Here is a rundown of the most relevant new features in #DuckDB 1.5.
Author

Ralph Straumann

Published

March 22, 2026

A few days ago, DuckDB 1.5.0 was released1. This release includes a large number of updates, some of which specifically for geospatial applications. For example:

GEOMETRY becomes a built-in data type

This move mirrors the approach recently taken by Parquet.2 From the announcement:

Geospatial data is no longer niche. (…) By moving GEOMETRY into DuckDB’s core, extensions can now produce and consume geometry values natively, without depending on spatial. While the spatial extension still provides most of the functions for working with geometries, the type itself becomes a shared foundation that the entire ecosystem can build on.

And:

This change also enables deeper integration with DuckDB’s storage engine and query optimizer, unlocking new compression techniques, query optimizations, and CRS awareness capabilities that were not possible when GEOMETRY only existed as an extension type.

Improved storage as WKB

GEOMETRY values are now stored as Well-Known Binary. This replaces a custom format that was used previously in the spatial extension.

We’ve also implemented a new storage technique specialized for GEOMETRY. When a geometry column contains values that all share the same type and vertex dimensions, DuckDB can additionally apply “shredding”: rather than storing opaque blobs, the column is decomposed into primitive STRUCT, LIST, and DOUBLE segments that compress far more efficiently. This can reduce on-disk size by roughly 3x for uniform geometry columns such as point clouds.

Geometry statistics and query optimization

Sounds like GEOMETRY columns now receive a kind of automatic spatial indexing treatment:

GEOMETRY columns now track per-row-group statistics - including the bounding box and the set of geometry types and vertex dimensions present. The query optimizer can use these to skip row groups that cannot match a query’s spatial predicates, similar to min/max pruning for numeric columns.

CRS awareness

The GEOMETRY type now has optional support for a CRS3 parameter, making the CRS explicit part of the data type system rather than a metadata component. Spatial functions enforce CRS consistency across their inputs, elminating a common source of errors in geospatial applications.

Only a couple of CRSs are built in by default, but loading the spatial extension registers over 7,000 CRSs from the EPSG4 dataset.

Finally, besides the DuckDB core, the SPATIAL extension also received an upgrade.

Very exciting developments!

Footnotes

  1. DuckDB is an open-source column-oriented Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) designed for analytics use-cases.↩︎

  2. An open-source, columnar storage file format designed for efficient data processing.↩︎

  3. Coordinate reference system.↩︎

  4. The EPSG Geodetic Parameter Dataset is a public registry of coordinate reference systems. “EPSG” stands for “European Petroleum Survey Group”, the body that originally created it. The dataset assigns numeric codes to CRSs (e.g., EPSG:4326 for WGS 1984).↩︎