This paper presents Sphinx, a full-fledged distributed system which uses a standard SQL interface to process big spatial data. Sphinx adds spatial data types, indexes and query processing, inside the code-base of Cloudera Impala for efficient processing of spatial data. In particular, Sphinx is composed of four main components, namely, query parser, indexer, query planner, and query executor. The query parser injects spatial data types and functions in the SQL interface of Sphinx. The indexer creates spatial index…