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 doesn’t require SQL Server Compact,...

Hi Folks, One of the most common questions about the spatial support in SQL Server is how to visualize results. To illustrate the problem, consider a query over zip code data: select id, shapegeog from zipcodes where id like '981%' The results, while an accurate description of the data, are profoundly...

Hi Folks, We have one more upcoming pre-release before we're done with SQL Server 2008, and while I've posted a few articles about the coordinate order swap, there's another exciting piece we're releasing: our builder API. Let's say you wanted to write a very simple method that shifted a geometry instance...

Hi Folks, I've been asked a few times how to find out what spatial columns are defined in a database. We don't have any special table for this, but you can easily find out by looking at the usual system views: SELECT ta.name as table_name, co.name as column_name FROM sys.tables ta JOIN sys.columns...

Hi Folks, In my last indexing post , I filled in most of the details about our multi-level grid index. Let me clean up a few lingering questions about our planar grid. We'll do this Q&A style: Q: What happens if I set the maximum number of cells-per-object so small that I cannot obtain...

Hi Folks, I recently got contacted via email with the following problem: ... I have 2 complex polygons, representing district boundaries. The polygons look correct, but I'm getting exceptions when I try to create the type. I've attached the wkt polygons to the email. These polygons are stored...

Hi Folks, We don't call them betas, but that's basically what CTPs are: they let us suss out problems before we drop a final product on everyone. Well, we've found a regression in the February CTP spatial support that we'd like to let you know about. Essentially, a costing problem was introduced...

Hi Folks, I just thought I'd take a few moments clarify the upcoming coordinate order swap for the geography type. Here's a quick FAQ on the issue: What exactly is the change? We are swapping the coordinate order for well-known text (WKT) and well-known binary (WKB) formats from latitude-longitude...

Hi Folks, Last time , we highlighted several problems with a simple grid index. If you don't recall---and since it's been a while, that wouldn't be a surprise---you may want to review them. In this post I'll start to describe how we get around them. In SQL Server, we don't use a simple grid like...

This is a little bit less of an introductory post than the last one , but there was quite a bit of discussion about our decision to split our spatial types in two---one for our planar ("flat-Earth") model and one for our ellipsoidal ("round-Earth") model---so I thought I'd address it. To be honest, this...

I’ve been pretty quiet around here, and at least part of the reason is that we’ve been pretty tight-lipped about what we’ve been up to. We’ve now gone public—we’re providing support for geospatial data in our next version of SQL Server, codenamed Katmai. The Virtual Earth folks mentioned this in their...