Thanks to the pervasiveness of GPS data, developers today are being asked to incorporate geospatial information into their data-driven applications.  Working with spatial data, though, involves using complex geometric formulas that are difficult to implement in SQL queries.  What developers need is a common abstraction layer running on the database itself that softens the complexity of working with geospatial data, yet is straightforward enough to incorporate directly into queries to provide spatial-based filtering and distance calculations.  Microsoft introduced two new spatial data types (Geometry and Geography) in SQL Server 2008 that provide an implementation of Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards.