Spatial Database in the Cloud
March 22, 2010 7 Comments
Ed Katibah has a [great post](http://blogs.msdn.com/edkatibah/archive/2010/03/21/spatial-data-support-coming-to-sql-azure.aspx) on something that should get geo-developers excited. Microsoft announced that they will be adding support for spatial data in SQL Azure very soon. Says Ed,
>I’ve been using SQL Azure with spatial support for a couple of weeks now and it works just like the spatial data support in SQL Server 2008 – same spatial data types, spatial methods and spatial indexes. It works in SQL Server Management Studio just like you would expect.
Ed notes two issues with using SQL Azure over SQL Server for your data:
1. You need to have a clustered index on the table you are inserting data into.
2. You may need to break your data loads up into chunks to prevent the connection to SQL Azure from timing out. (welcome to the cloud)
The good news is that SQL Azure seems to be a drop in replacement with all our tools. [Says Dale Lutz at Safe, "it just works"](http://twitter.com/DaleAtSafe/status/10846642100). I’m looking forward to talking with the Microsoft folks at the DevSummit to see how we can leverage it.
Here comes the spatial database into the cloud. Get your ducks in a row!
About James Fee
Of course this works as a drop in replacement for MSSql, it IS MSSql, just running on a box in one of MS’s data centers. Amazon RDS (http://aws.amazon.com/rds/) has spatial support too, since it’s nothing more than a linux box running MySQL on Amazon’s servers.
Any news on how/if this scales? Is it distributed, or just a single Windows instance running MSSql?
So am I migrating my plain-Joe SQL structures into a new schema here? Have some deep/wide desktop systems that will break if I switch out the back end to satisfy the upstream…
Now this is cloud ready
The SQL Azure database service offers a scalable and distributed database hosted in the cloud, and therefore highly available.
From Microsoft’s site:
Benefits of using SQL Azure
– No need to install or patch software or other physical administration
– Automatic high availability and fault tolerance
– Simple provisioning and deployment of multiple databases
– Scale databases up or down based on business needs
– Multi-tenant
– Integration with SQL Server and tooling including Visual Studio
– Support for T-SQL based familiar relational database model
spatial search goes mainstream.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2361693,00.asp
I can’t see how the majority of mapping websites could justify the increase in costs that would occur due to getting the spatial data out of the database.
http://geographika.co.uk/does-sql-azure-have-allure
@anon “Any news on how/if this scales? Is it distributed, or just a single Windows instance running MSSql?”
It will be distributed across lost of hardware, and apparently even self-healing..
Will the vendors all play nice with each other’s clouds? Or will it be a case explained by this musical reply:
Cheers,
Aaron
I don’t know why they are going for a Thundercats movie ? Is it to make more money than usual or is it for the fans or is it for creative reasons ? I really don’t get it. Anyways, I never liked thundercats and always found it too bland and uninteresting. Ok, the action was good but the characters had nothing to add to the whole drama. This is going to be very boring.