What's New and How to Upgrade
Introduction
Descartes Labs is excited to announce significant updates to the Vector API, introducing new features, improvements, and enhanced capabilities. These changes not only bring exciting additions to the API but also pave the way for vector visualization in Explorer. This article will guide you through the latest enhancements, interface updates, and data additions.
Vector API Highlights
1. Relational and Spatial Joins
The Vector API now supports relational and spatial joins across Tables, providing more flexibility in analyzing spatial datasets.
2. Grouping and Aggregation
Tables can be grouped and aggregated, allowing users to extract summary statistics and gain deeper insights into their datasets.
3. Custom Schemas
Users can define their own schemas when creating a Table, resulting in a cleaner interface and improved performance. This change eliminates the requirement for a geometry column, providing better support for non-spatial tabular datasets.
4. Compatibility with Pandas and GeoPandas
The API has been reworked to closely resemble the Catalog API and now natively supports Pandas DataFrames and GeoPandas GeoDataFrames, making data manipulation more seamless.
5. Example Notebooks
New example notebooks have been added to showcase these features. For more detailed information, refer to the Vector guide.
Upgrade to descarteslabs-vector Python Client 0.2.0
To take advantage of these updates, it is essential to upgrade to the latest release of the Vector Python client (0.2.0). Workbench has already been updated, and you can use the following command to manually upgrade in any other environment:
pip install descarteslabs-vector==0.2.0
Kindly be aware that Tables created with version 0.1.0 have been successfully migrated to the new system, however, they will not be able to take advantage of the latest updates. If you have any existing Tables that require transitioning to a new, custom schema, please don't hesitate to reach out to our support team for assistance.
Data Updates
Vector
Several sample datasets have been added to Vector, including:
These datasets expand the available resources for users, enabling more comprehensive analyses and visualizations.
Stay tuned for more updates and features from Descartes Labs as we continue to enhance the Vector API and provide valuable tools for geospatial analysis. For any queries or assistance, feel free to reach out to our support team.