GIS and RestMQ

Geographical data structures and commands have been added to Redis's 3.2 branch and offer new opportunities to add GIS capabilities to Redis-based projects. Before we examine how a GIS-based messaging system can be built with Redis, we'll explore the basic operations of these newer geographical-based commands.

Note

Currently, the geographical commands and functionality is only available in the Redis 3.2 version. To use these commands, you'll need to download the 3.2 release of Redis and compile it for use.

The geographical-based commands operate by using a technique called geohashing that is a latitude/longitude encoding system which constructs a hierarchical spatial structure dividing space into buckets on a grid. The geohash algorithm was created by Gustavo Niemeyer for the http://geohash.org web service. The construction of geohash allows for nearby geographical locations to share the same initial characters that, as the hash's characters are defined, the precision of the...