So reading the MapDotNet Blog and how UX Studio can load shapefiles (and SDE) into SQL Server 2008 I thought I give it a spin. You have to download the whole UX platform to get UX Studio so make sure that you do a custom install so that you only get UX Studio (rather than the whole SDK and Web Services). To load data into SQL Server 2008 is very simple, all you need to do is start up UX Studio and add a shapefile to the project. Then right click on the shapefile in the data sources panel and select “Export Data”. You’ll get a dialog that looks like this:
When you click start the file is converted from shapefile to SQL Server 2008 table. A quick look at the table in Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio shows the whole file uploaded perfectly. What a quick and easy way to convert your shapefiles (and SDE layers) to SQL Server 2008.
Success!
So there you go, loading data into SQL Server 2008 requires only the free UX Studio. Nice!