Microsoft SQL Server 2008 to have spatial data natively

via Virtual Earth/Live Maps Blog

Today at the Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference, Ted Kummert, VP of the Storage Platform Division, introduced SQL Server 2008 (Katmai) in his keynote [Press Release]. Scheduled to ship in 2008, Katmai will be the first version of SQL Server to support spatial data and operations natively. Pretty cool! Finally, support for Spatial as a first class data type with indexing.

  • Spatial will be supported in the next release of SQL Server (code named Katmai) as system data types
  • Katmai is scheduled to ship in 2008 and will most likely be called SQL Server 2008
  • Katmai spatial will support two models: a Flat Earth’ planar data type and a Round Earth’ geodetic data type
  • The Flat Earth data type (GEOMETRY) will support the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Simple Features for SQL Specification with support for approximately 70 spatial methods/functions
  • There will be spatial indexes for both planar and geodetic data types

The SQL Server spatial team will apparently be watching to see what users want. All I can say is Giddy-Up!

Virtual Earth and SQL Server 2008 should be quite the team.


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Date
May 10, 2007