MapForums

Introduction


Now that SQL Server 2008 has been released to manufacturing it is time again to go a bit more into the details about integrating Virtual Earth and SQL Server 2008. SQL Server 2008 provides 2 spatial data types, spatial indices and more than 70 spatial-functions. It is a wonderful tool to manage huge amounts of spatial data but it doesn't have a visualization component and even if it had, wouldn't it be great to see your data on a nice background map? On the other side Virtual Earth has great visuals but sometimes you would like to add additional spatial data - for example land parcels.
Well, of course Virtual Earth has its ways to overlay your own data but:

• If you overlay these data as vector data you can only use simple points, lines and polygons. Multigeometries would need to be disaggregated, polygons with holes would be a real challenge and if the total amount of vertices exceeds a few thousand then the performance goes really down since everything will be rendered in the browser through JavaScript-methods.
• If you overlay the data as rasters, you can avoid all the challenges mentioned above but on the other side you loose the meta-data.

Further down below you find a number of previous postings which describes basic methods of integrating Virtual Earth and SQL Server 2008 but now we want to take it a step further.




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