Some spatial questions
Currently I'm using a hybrid solution of SQL Server 2005 for my data and PostreSQL with PostGIS for my spatial datasets. This is cumbersome and I personally can't wait for the spatial data types and functionality of SQL Server 2008.
Obviously until the first CTP drop is available that includes the spatial support I can't test it for myself, but I would like to know what the plans are for supporting the industry standards like OGC? Will there be complete support or only a subset of functions supported?
In terms of index performance I read somewhere that in some cases bounding circles will be used instead of bounding boxes. Is there a significant advantage to this?
Hi Craig,
The geometry type (and indexing) will be avilable in the upcoming CTP-5. It will support all of the OGC "simple features for SQL" functionality for planar data. The geography type is our round-earth type, and it will support a subset of the OGC functionality.
As for bounding boxes vs. circles, we don't exactly use either of them for indexing. For the geometry type, you'll be able to extract a good ol' bounding box from the instance. On round-earth data, it becomes less clear what exactly a bounding box should look likeI can think of a few good definiitons.
Cheers,
-Isaac
