For thirty years, geospatial formats were something the rest of the data world tolerated at arm's length. That ended in 2025: the Apache Parquet specification officially adopted GEOMETRY and GEOGRAPHY as native types, and Apache Iceberg 3 includes them too [1]. "GeoParquet 2.0" is, in effect, just Parquet — geometry as a first-class citizen of the mainstream data stack rather than a metadata bolt-on [1].
The four formats worth knowing
- GeoParquet — columnar vectors for analytics. Works in DuckDB, GeoPandas, Apache Sedona, Databricks, and Snowflake — as Matt Forrest puts it, "no specialized GIS software needed" [2]. Community guidance: stay on GeoParquet 1.1 in production until 2.0 tooling catches up [1].
- PMTiles — an entire tile pyramid in a single file, served by plain HTTP range requests. No tile server to run [2].
- COG (Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF) — rasters whose internal tiling and overviews let a client read only the region it needs [2].
- Zarr — chunked n-dimensional arrays, becoming the choice at NOAA and NASA for climate and weather data [2].
Proof at planetary scale
These are not conference-slide formats. The Overture Maps Foundation — backed by Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Esri — distributes its entire global dataset as GeoParquet and PMTiles, including 2.6 billion buildings, 447 million addresses, and 321 million road segments, each carrying a stable GERS identifier as of the June 2025 GA release [3]. And when the Taylor Geospatial Engine and Radiant Earth liberated Google's AlphaEarth satellite embeddings from the Earth Engine ecosystem in November 2025, the vehicle was 465 TB of Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs on Source Cooperative [4].
What changes for you
Two practical shifts. First, the shapefile's last remaining excuse — universality — is eroding as the big data platforms read geometry natively. Second, "publish a map layer" increasingly means "put a file on object storage," not "stand up a server." If your pipeline still round-trips everything through zipped shapefiles, 2026 is a good year to add Parquet-shaped exits. Rasters, point clouds, and spatial indexes are next on the GeoParquet roadmap [1], so the direction of travel is clear.