Geospatial Indexes

Geospatial indexes are a specialized type of index designed to efficiently query and manage geospatial data stored within a collection of documents. Amazon DocumentDB supports 2dsphere indexes, which are specifically designed to handle geospatial data on a sphere (like the Earth). This allows for accurate calculations and queries based on spherical geometry.

Geospatial indexes are beneficial when your applications need to perform location-based queries, such as:

• finding nearby points of interest,

• determining if a location falls within a specific area

• calculating distances between locations

Supported index properties

Option	3.6	4.0	5.0	8.0	Elastic Cluster
name	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

Creating a geospatial index

Use the createIndex() method to create a geospatial index. The method syntax is: db.collection.createIndex(<key>, <options>)

The key parameter is a JSON document that specifies the field and 2dsphere index type:

{
  "<field>": "2dsphere"
}

The options parameter is a JSON document that specifies the options for the index:

{
  "name": "<name>"
}

See Index Properties for examples of creating geospatial indexes.