Spatial Data Support Coming To Microsoft SQL Azure

Late last week Microsoft announced as part of MIX10 that spatial data support will be coming to the Microsoft SQL Azure Platform.

Microsoft® SQL Azure™ Database is a cloud-based relational database service built on SQL Server® technologies. It provides a highly available, scalable, multi-tenant database service hosted by Microsoft in the cloud. SQL Azure Database helps to ease provisioning and deployment of multiple databases. Developers do not have to install, setup, patch or manage any software. High availability and fault tolerance is built-in and no physical administration is required.

This is great news for those living in the spatial world as it allows developers to take advantage of native Microsoft SQL Server data types in the cloud.

One of the biggest requests we received was to support spatial data in SQL Azure and that feature will be available for you in SU3 (June). Within this feature is support for the Geography and Geometry types as well as query support in T-SQL. This is a significant feature and now opens the Windows Azure Platform to support spatial and location aware applications.

Spatial data support is scheduled for the SU3 release which will be ~ June 2010 and it will work just like the spatial data support in Microsoft SQL Server 2008.

Same spatial data types, spatial methods and spatial indexes.  It works in SQL Server Management Studio just like you would expect.

Query performance is excellent.  In the above example, the query executed in under a second against a table containing over 1.8 million rows (GeoNames points-of-interest for the United States).

For users wanting to take advantage of Microsoft SQL Azure now, ESRI MapIt allows you to load as well as read and visualise data directly from the cloud. This is done through the use of XY’s.

There a few real differences between Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and Microsoft SQL Azure. Ed Katibah explains these here: http://blogs.msdn.com/edkatibah/…

Spatial data support on Microsoft SQL Azure is great! This opens up the door to many developers and location aware applications. Location aware applications are becoming more and more popular and being able to utilise the cloud is a massive step forward.

Remember that in ArcGIS 10, query layers will allow you to read directly from Microsoft SQL Server 2008. You can then republish these as services. Theoretically this should be possible with data on Microsoft SQL Azure as well. I’ll run a few tests to see if this is the case but it’s definitely something to keep in mind.