First up, my article Hierarchy ID has been published in MSDN Magazine. Its also available on the MSDN Web Site at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc794278.aspx. Second, my recent interview with Dr. Greg Low and his world famous ''SQL Downunder Podcast'' is now avaialbe at http://www.sqldownunder.com/PreviousShows/tabid/98/Default.aspx. ...

The RTM version of SQL Server 2008 and recently release of the CLR updates with Visual Studio 2008 SP1 gave us the SqlGeometryBuilder and SqlGeographyBuilder classes to work with. These are very handy, simple APIs but, well, lets just say that the documentation on them is a bit lacking (Isaac Kunen's as some discussion of them at Our Upcoming ...

I guess when the developers decide it is not. Consider the following query: drop table dbo.shapeParts go create table dbo.shapeParts( shapePartID tinyint not null identity(1,1) primary key, shapeID tinyint not null, shapeQuad tinyint null, shape geometry not null); go insert into dbo.shapeParts ...

On 6 August 2008, I will be giving a presentation to the Omaha SQL/BI User Group on the new features in SQL Server 2008 Integration Services. We will talk about improvements in scripting, how the redesigned pipeline improves performance and how to leverage the new Cache Transform to improve package performance. Quinn Jones from Farm Credit ...

I've had a lot of ''fun'' working the with new spatial types in SQL Server 2008. Fun like your first root canal sometimes, fun like a great first date other times. One of the ''root canal moments'' for me has been around Geographic Markup Language (GML) support. I had spent a good chunk of time generating GML for use in class to subsequently ...

Yesterday I drove down from Sioux Falls to Omaha so that I could catch a talk being given by Sudhir Gajre to the Omaha SQL Server/BI Interest Group. I first got to know Sudhir when he, I and Luke Schollmeyer were restarting a SQL Server Users Group in Omaha. Sudhir is a stud at SQL Server performance tuning and helped write one of the best papers ...

But this eye candy is worth waiting for.  What I am talking about? I have spend that last weeks nose down in the Spatial bits for SQL Server 2008. I really believe this is the darkhorse super feature of the product. But a big problem with it has been visualizing the results. Unless you good at mentally visualing spatial relationships, it can ...