Keeping up with Microsoft SQL Server Spatial

Last year at our Location Intelligence Conference, many attendees were treated to one of the first in depth looks at Microsoft SQL Spatial. And since that time, with all of the ruckus over Bing and Bing Maps for the Enterprise, aka Virtual Earth (there is a ruckus over Bing, right?), it’s easy to lose sight of the more "meaty" technology of SQL Server Spatial, or SSS for short. At today’s PBBI Insights conference in Orlando, Ed Katibah, Microsoft’s Spatial Program Manager, revealed a few new tidbits. I’ll give you a few morsels to chew on below but I won’t do justice to some of the details that Ed has provided on his blog, SpatialEd.

SQL Server Management Studio is a developer’s console in which you can connect and query the database, but then preview the results on a basic map, if the query is spatial in nature. In other words, it is really the SQL Server GUI for DBAs. If, during your query, you return one or more results that has a spatial component, you get a “Spatial Results” tab in Management Studio. It gives a DBA a quick glimpse of their data; otherwise you get a “hex” representation. It’s just meant to give an idea of whether you have created a spatial query or not.

A few new features to help remove slivers from polygon joins:

• GeometryEnvelopeAggregate – new geometry function
• GeographyUnionAggregate – simple features implementation (every row is separate from every other row)
• Dbo.geographyunionaggragate (GEOG, 0) takes away the slivers and gaps to the data, where "0" is a tolerance level to "look" for slivers.

Up next in SQL Server 10.5:

• Spatial Data support for SQL Server Reporting Services (See Ed’s five-part series on this)
• Virtual Earth, sorry, Bing Maps for Enterprise, is now capable of being a backdrop in SQL Server Reporting Services (see bullet above)
• Microsoft’s BI side of the house will be able to read SSS services
• SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) will eventually be able to read SSS services (Ed says it’s down the road)
• Full globe geography feature – no restrictions on spatial object dimension in next release (to clarify: SQL11, the next major release); up to the size of the globe

Ed emphasized that “Version 1 of SSS is pretty strong stuff…it’s rock solid." Very large spatial objects can be stored…up to 2 GB in size; 150,000,000 vertices per linestring/polygon.

And for SQL Server 11? MSFT is not committed fully to this as yet but 3D prototyping is in the works. MSFT is looking to provide a persistent methods and repository to store 3D data.