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.
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