Good Vibes on Virtual Earth

There is a strong, positive 'vibe' coming from the Microsoft Virtual Earth booth here at GEOINT. When people engage they immediately see not only the massive amount of online content from Virtual Earth but they feel the energy of Microsoft staff and the innovation of its partners. It's very much like an high-energy, very edgy, start-up.

One of the great stories from the Microsoft Virtual Earth booth this week was the continued progress on "SQL Server Spatial". This is the first version of SQL Server to support spatial data and operations natively. Here are the high points -

- Comprehensive spatial support lets you build spatial capabilities into your applications by using the support for spatial data in SQL Server 2008.

- High performance spatial data capabilities with SQL Server 2008.

- Extend spatial support by integrating spatial data in SQL Server 2008 with location-enabled applications and services.

We also discussed "Round Earth" and "Flat Earth" solutions in SQL Server 2008 Spatial Data with Ed Katibah.

Basically, Round Earth solutions use the new geography data type to store geodetic spatial data and perform operations on it, and Flat Earth solutions use the new geometry data type to store planar spatial data and perform operations on it.

I'm sure there will be alot more coming...