The most important geospatial software?

I like the occasional bold theory. A month ago, Drew Breunig blogged about a very bold one: #DuckDB probably being the most important geospatial software of the last decade. What gives?
Author

Ralph Straumann

Published

June 17, 2025

I like the occasional bold theory. A month ago, Drew Breunig blogged about a very bold one: DuckDB probably [being] the most important geospatial software of the last decade. There’s anecdata1 [sic]:

Google trends for “geospatial” and “duckdb”

From the blog post:

Prior to this, getting up and running from a cold-start might’ve required installing or even compiling several OSS packages, carefully noting path locations, standing up a specialized database… Enough work that a data generalist might not have bothered, or their IT department might not have supported it.

With DuckDB spatial, it became possible for casual geospatial work to occur. All within SQL… And that makes the ecosystem bigger.

Interesting comments – supportive and blowback – also on Hacker News, for example from a DuckDB engineer:

… the fact that you can e.g. convert to and from a myriad of different geospatial formats by utilizing GDAL, transforming through SQL, or pulling down the latest Overture dump without having the whole workflow break just cause you updated QGIS has probably been the main killer feature for a lot of the early adopters.