Ed Katibah has a great post 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”. 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!
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDpfRYy2RsY&w=560&h=315]