Come and join us for this great evening focusing on spatial data and how you can integrate virtual earth and SQL Server to do some amazing things. Virtual Earth provides great features for visualising, performing routing and locating places, SQL Server allows for data to be stored, searched together they provide a great solution.

This evening will be hosted by Johannes Kebeck and Simon Sabin

These meetings are great opportunities to meet other SQL Server professionals, get your burning issues solved.

This is a povisional agenda, it will be updated as we get more details.

Agenda

18:00 - 18:30 Meet & Greet

18:30 - 18:40 Intro, what’s in the news, Q&A.

18:40 - 19:40 End to End Spatial Data with Johannes Kebeck

Johannes will walk through an end to end scenario of getting spatial data into SQL Server and then getting it out and displaying it visually. We will look at the sources of data and how you can manage different types of data i.e. data from GPS systems and data from Ordance Survey. And from a visualisation point of view will look at the options with Virtual Earth including the Ajax control, the web services and recently announced silverlight control. Through out this session Johannes will look at some of the obstacles you might face in working with spatial data.

19:40 - 20:00 Networking with refreshments (sponsored by Microsoft)

20:00 - 21:00 Managing Spatial data in SQL Server with Simon Sabin

Once you have you data in SQL Server how do you query it and how do you make your queries perform. In SQL Server 2008 spatial indexes where introduced that all you to perform complex spatial queries and get performance. However spatial indexes aren't always best. We will look at the types of situation where spatial indexes aren't the best solution and look at those which are.