Scaling geospatial data is hard. State of the art GIS technologies available to the general public are locked in the realm of relational databases with PostGIS as the prominent leader. Though a number of location-based startups have walked this path before, few have marked their trail along the way. Act one proveds a survey of the landscape, defining terms, and highlighting pitfalls. Act two explores the world of open source, horizontally scalable GIS and outlines the problems they solve. Act three explores implementations backed by HBase. No previous GIS knowledge is required.