IBM Cloudant Geospatial notice

What is IBM Cloudant Geospatial?

Data is stored as GeoJSON in the IBM Cloudant database to describe point, line, polygon, multi-point, multi-line, and multi-polygon objects. Each object, as well as the geographic information, can have optional properties: Metadata about the object, which is returned in the search results.

Again, an index is defined as a JavaScript function, and then, queries can be used to ask questions of your collection of geographic features. For example, find me the nearest object to this point; find objects within this polygon; find objects along this path; or find objects that intersect with this object.

To summarize, IBM Cloudant Geo is something unique to the IBM Cloudant service and is used to perform advanced geospatial queries against your databases of GeoJSON objects. It cannot be combined with other index types. It is only of use to Geographic Information Systems or use-cases that have a purely geographic purpose.

What is changing?

As of 1 February 2023, the following conditions apply:

• Users cannot query /$DATABASE/_design/$DDOCS/_geo endpoints. Requests to those endpoints return a 404 Not Found response.
• Users can define indexes by using the st_indexes keyword in design documents, but those indexes are ignored by the service. This ensures that existing design documents can be updated, and replications that contain geospatial indexes do not fail. Existing Geo indexes will be deleted, and customers will no longer be billed for the space they consume.
• IBM Cloud® support will no longer answer questions or assist with issues that are related to the Geospatial feature of the IBM Cloudant service.

Alternatives to geospatial

Many simple geospatial queries can be done without using the Geospatial capability that was removed from the IBM Cloudant service. These alternatives are described in this IBM Cloudant blog post.