Mapbox and Snowflake have teamed up to add location intelligence capabilities to the Snowflake Data Cloud. The Mapbox Native App for Snowflake is an innovative solution that enables Snowflake users to work with and extract insights from geospatial information. With a simple SQL statement, data analysts and decision-makers can call the Mapbox Geocoding API and use Mapbox Boundaries to validate and standardize addresses, transform addresses into geographic coordinates (and vice versa), and aggregate data by various administrative, legislative, political, and postal boundaries more easily than ever before. 

Simplified Data Conversion and Analysis

Today, companies across virtually all industries use the Mapbox Geocoding API to validate addresses and convert them into geographic coordinates (and vice versa). Geocoding powers navigation for ride-hailing and last-mile delivery companies – as well as the in-dash navigation experience for GM, Toyota, and other large OEMs. Companies that track assets, which range from vehicles and IoT devices to people and even pets (via GPS-enabled collars), use Geocoding to better understand where their assets are and where they have been. In a business intelligence context, our customers cleanse and segment customer data, identify trends in footfall, calculate the movement of assets through various tax jurisdictions, and much more. 

In each of these cases, the Geocoding API is integral to transforming raw geospatial data into a standardized format that enables analysts to perform analysis, aggregation, and visualization; extract valuable insights; and drive decision-making. With the latest version of the Geocoding API – Geocoding v6, currently in Private Preview – we have added a number of features specifically for business intelligence users, including higher-throughput batch processing, match codes, and a new response format that prioritizes comprehension and ease-of-use. Because Geocoding v6 powers the Mapbox Snowflake Native App, all of these features are available in the Native App right out of the box.

Integrated Global Boundaries Data

The Mapbox Native App for Snowflake also provides access to the industry-leading Mapbox Boundaries. This dataset contains over 5 million polygons for national and sub-national boundaries for every country in the world – including administrative, political, statistical, and postal boundaries. All polygons are edge-matched and topologically accurate, ensuring that there are no gaps or overlaps.

Mapbox Boundaries is typically delivered as a tileset, but with the Mapbox Native App, we are introducing a new way to interact with the product. For any point on the globe, the Mapbox Native App performs a “point-in-polygon” search, which returns the hierarchy of Boundaries that contain that point. In the U.S., for example, a query can return standard administrative and postal boundaries, metropolitan statistical areas, census tracts/blocks, state and national legislative districts, and more. The richness of these boundaries enables users to aggregate data in a variety of ways and join to publicly-available datasets from the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and more – making it easy to further enrich data and add more analytical depth and insight. With global datasets, users can aggregate data in standardized ways across regions and countries without needing a deep understanding of local governmental structures.

Collaborating for Location Intelligence 

Geospatial data is extremely powerful, but can be difficult to work with. Our collaboration with Snowflake is driven by a shared vision to expand access to Mapbox geospatial capabilities – putting these capabilities in the hands of data analysts and other business professionals via simple SQL functions so that they can make more informed decisions more easily and quickly than ever before.

Get started by learning more about the Mapbox Snowflake Native App.