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Get yer spatial!

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I'm happy to say that our latest community technology preview (CTP), officially dubbed the "November CTP" for obvious reasons, has been released.  You can get it here.

This CTP has all of the spatial funcitonality we've been talking about:

  • Planar "geometry" type
  • Geodetic "geography" type
  • An extensive collection of methods to go with each type
  • Spatial indexing

At this point, you should expect most of the final functionality to be available.  We'll obviously be fixing any defects that are found, and we're going to try to slip in a few more goodies before we ship. 

Enjoy!  We're looking forward to your feedback.

Cheers,
-Isaac

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 19, 2007
    Isaac, can you provide information on the type of spatial indexing available? Quadtrees, R-Trees etc?

  • Anonymous
    November 19, 2007
    Hi Mark, We're using what we're calling an "adaptive multi-level grid" index.  Conceptually, it's very much like a quad-tree, although the number of cells at each level ranges from 16 to 256. How we do indexing is probably worth a post.  Or ten.  :) Cheers, -Isaac

  • Anonymous
    November 19, 2007
    Mark, I should also mention that the Books Online that ships with the CTP should give you some more information on indexing. Cheers, -Isaac

  • Anonymous
    November 19, 2007
    In fact the help with the CTP is excellant and documents all the new functionality providing good solid code samples. For example I imported the geonames.com dataset (6.6million rows), the spatial index took 90 min to apply but the results where staggering - 7min+ to 2 sec on one query, clearly the index works! John.

  • Anonymous
    November 20, 2007
    Microsoft has not been shouting much from the rooftops regarding the new release, but we got word it's now available, complete with "most of" the final geospatial support, for download. More details and an "early review" of indexing (in comments) at Isaa

  • Anonymous
    November 20, 2007
    Just a quick invitation to any folks that want to load up SQL Server Spatial with a bunch of data -- you're welcome to try out the FME 2008 beta from http://www.safe.com/beta and get an eval license from us -- we'd welcome your feedback. FME is a Spatial ETL tool that moves spatial data between a wide variety of GIS/Database/CAD systems, and we've got support for SQL Server Spatial in the beta of our next release.  We also have an integration with SSIS as well -- you can see more details of all this at http://www.safe.com/microsoft. Dale

  • Anonymous
    November 21, 2007
    Isaac mentioned in the webcast about a .Net client library from SQL2008 that could be used for spatial stuff that did not required a connection to SQL Server.  Does anyone know any details about this?  I'd like the ability to do things such as simplification, union, intersection, and buffering. Kirk