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H3 (Uber geospatial index)

H3 (h3geo.org, github.com/uber/h3) is Uber's open-source hexagonal hierarchical spatial index — the successor to Google's S2 library that Uber originally used for dispatch-service geospatial sharding. (Source: sources/2024-03-14-highscalability-brief-history-of-scaling-uber)

Same role as S2: partition geographic space into cells that can serve as shard keys for geospatial systems (e.g., dispatch) plus aggregation units for analytics. Hexagons (rather than S2's squares) give more uniform neighbor distances and better fit many rider-driver-marketplace computations.

Primary-source references:

• H3: Uber's hexagonal hierarchical spatial index
• Visualizing city cores with H3

Seen in

• sources/2024-03-14-highscalability-brief-history-of-scaling-uber — introduced as the open-sourced successor to S2 that Uber's dispatch stack migrated to.

Related

• systems/s2-geometry — the predecessor library.
• systems/uber-dispatch — the primary use case inside Uber.
• companies/uber — origin org.
• concepts/geospatial-sharding — the shard-key-from-geography pattern.