Hi Folks, As part of the SQL Server 2012 launch, I've contributed a presentation on StreamInsight 2.0, which is available either on TechNet or the Microsoft Virtual Academy . You can get the code associated with the video here code . Enjoy! ...

Cute! Although I’m guessing that people who really are into maps have a slightly higher view of Mercator than he implies. Cheers, -Isaac

Hi Folks, I just wrapped up my talk the 2011 PASS Summit . Here are a few quick thoughts: StreamInsight seems like a technology that could benefit a large number of customers, for a large number of scenarios. But relatively few people even know what SI...

Alastair Aitchison has started a series on doing spatiotemporal analysis using StreamInsight and the SQL Server spatial library over on his blog . I’ll certainly be watching how he makes out. To answer one question he asks in his post: StreamInsight...

Hi Folks, As I mentioned some a few posts ago, I recently made a move to the StreamInsight team. Well, we’ve just released the new version, StreamInsight 1.2, so it’s time to start talking about what we’ve been up to. One of the...

Hi Folks, I’m going to pick up from last time and discuss another major problem with moving databases from one place to another: collations. Some people will have never run into collation issues because they have a consistent collation across all of their...

Hi Folks, As I mentioned in my previous post , I recently moved from my old home in the SQL Server engine to the StreamInsight team. As I continue to ramp up here, I want to take a few posts to talk about what I was working on back in the engine: the...

Hi Folks, Many years ago I kicked up this blog. It started with a trickle of general posts on SQL Server programmability topics. As our spatial support took off, it was quickly consumed by spatial-related posts. And then it languished… …and now its back...

Hi Folks, Over at his blog , Nicklas Avéns questions the behavior of Filter. He's right: Filter is a little odd. It is also very much by design. Before we look at filter, let's review the data flow for a typical spatial query. A spatial selection...

Hi Folks, As part of a larger effort to document our protocols, SQL Server has just released documentation on the structure of our spatial types.  The document is also available in PDF .  Note that all of this is preliminary, and while I doubt...

Hi Folks, The title of this post states the obvious: the area of a sphere is finite.  We even have a nice formula for it, 4πr 2 .  The same is true for an ellipsoid, which is just a sat-upon sphere, although computing the area gets more complicated...

Hi Folks, Marko Tintor from our Serbia team just dropped some new functionality into the SQL Server Spatial Tools project on CodePlex: A method for testing whether a geography instance is valid. Better: a method for creating a valid geography from invalid...

Hi Folks, We all know that the sphere isn’t the plane, and that an ellipsoid is different as well, but I don’t know if everyone has given so much thought to the practical effects of these differences. And so I thought it might be a nice idea to catalog...

Hi Folks, This post contains no new information; it’s just a rollup of links to spatial indexing posts I’ve made.  If you want to know more about spatial indexing, these are the ones to read. In order: Why a Spatial Index? A Simple Spatial Indexing...

Simon Sabin asked me to pass along information about a free spatial event that he and Johannes Kebeck are holding in London on the 16th.  It looks like they’ll be covering a bunch of hot SQL Server Spatial topics: how to get your data in to SQL,...

Hi Folks, Jason Follas recently ran across a lingering issue when using our spatial library without the server.  I mistakenly thought the fix had been shipped, but for now it remains. The background is that the spatial library consists of a managed...

Hi Folks, It occurs to me that I haven’t posted anything about the hemisphere limitation for the SQL Server geography type.  This limitation is a little confusing, and could probably use some clarification. It also occurs to me that I haven’t posted...

Hi Folks, While I continue to procrastinate, here are some excellent spatial resources to peruse. First, David Lean, a Microsoft evangelist, has very comprehensive list of spatial posts over on his Dave does Data blog.  He covers a wide range of...

Last time , I posted a question sent to me by Rob Mount.  So what solutions exist other than the north pole? You did well: jnelso99 got part of the way there; tanoshimi finished it off.  We can find a set of circles around the south pole with...

Hi Folks, At PDC I gave a talk largely inspired by topics raised here and in the spatial forums.  But “inspired by” doesn’t equate to “a duplicate of”, and to turn things around, I’ve been meaning to write a few posts here inspired by my PDC talk...

This has come up a few times now.  Multiple questions deserve at least one answer, right? First, Microsoft has not produced a shapefile loader (or exporter).  If this is important to you, here’s the Connect item to hit.  (And yes: we do...

Despite my relative youth, I can be a bit of a fuddy-duddy. Fighting my natural impulses, I’ve decided to give Twitter a try---at least while I’m at PDC. So, if you’re interested in tracking me down, surf the tubes over to my very own Truman Show . Or...

Hi Folks, Spatial users often want to find the object nearest a given point. This operation, usually referred to as nearest neighbor search , is remarkably common in many areas of computer science. In general, we may wish to find not only the nearest...

Hi Folks, A post on the spatial forum last week caught my attention for entirely non-spatial reasons: it made use of two functions---RADIANS() and DEGREES()---that I never knew existed. It seems rather strange that out of the innumerable (well, technically...

Hi Folks, Unfortunately, I need to correct an earlier post of mine .  I will not be speaking at PASS this year---it looks like there were some mixed signals.  If you’re looking for your spatial fix, Michael Rys will be talking about types and...