Introduction to the Analytics Toolbox

The CARTO Analytics Toolbox is a suite of functions and procedures to easily enhance the geospatial capabilities available in the different leading cloud data warehouses.

It is currently available for Google BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Databricks and PostgreSQL.

The Analytics Toolbox contains more than 100 advanced spatial functions, grouped in different modules. For most data warehouses, a core set of functions are distributed as open source, while the most advanced functions (including vertical-specific modules such as retail) are distributed only to CARTO customers.

How does it work

The CARTO Analytics Toolbox is a set of SQL UDFs and Stored Procedures that run natively within each data warehouse, leveraging their computational power and scalability and avoiding the need for time consuming ETL processes.

The functions can be executed directly from the CARTO Workspace or in your cloud data warehouse console and APIs, using SQL commands.

Here’s an example of a query that returns the compact H3 cells for a given region, using Analytics Toolbox functions such as H3_POLYFILL() or H3_COMPACT() from our H3 module.

Check the documentation for each data warehouse (listed below) for a complete SQL reference, guides, and examples as well as instructions in order to install the Analytics Toolbox in your data warehouse.

WITH q AS (
  SELECT `carto-os`.carto.H3_COMPACT(
  `carto-os`.carto.H3_POLYFILL(geom,11)) as h3
  FROM `carto-do-public-data.carto.geography_usa_censustract_2019`
  WHERE geoid='36061009900'
) 

SELECT h3 FROM q, UNNEST(h3) as h3