The problem of matching GPS locations to roads and local government areas (LGAs) involves handling large datasets and a number of geospatial operations. In this deep dive, we will outline the challenges of developing scalable solutions for these tasks. We will discuss our multi-step approach, first focusing on the use of H3 indexing to isolate matches with single candidates, then explaining use of different geospatial computational techniques to accurately match points with multiple candidates. From technical perspective, the talk will showcase the use of broadcasting and partitioning techniques, their effect on autoscaling, memory usage and effective data parallelization. This session is for anyone interested in geospatial data, spark performance optimization and the real-world challenges of large-scale data engineering.

In this session, we will explore the Australian Red Cross Lifeblood's approach to synchronizing an Azure SQL Datavault 2.0 (DV2.0) implementation with Unity Catalog (UC) using Lakeflow Connect. Lifeblood's DV2.0 data warehouse, which includes raw vault (RV) and business vault (BV) tables, as well as information marts defined as views, required a multi-step process to achieve data/business logic sync with UC. This involved using Lakeflow Connect to ingest RV and BV data, followed by a custom process utilizing JDBC to ingest view definitions, and the automated/manual conversion of T-SQL to Databricks SQL views, with Lakehouse Monitoring for validation. In this talk, we will share our journey, the design decisions we made, and how the resulting solution now supports analytics workloads, analysts, and data scientists at Lifeblood.