Customer Reviews

Beginning Spatial with SQL Server 2008 (Expert's Voice in SQL Server)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

When I started reading Alastair Aitchison's book on Beginning Spatial with SQL Server 2008 I thought to myself, "Wow, I'm glad this is the beginning book." The concepts that make up spatial data and the means necessary to store and retrieve this data from your SQL Server database are quite difficult. Luckily Mr. Aitchison has written this book. I've just read the entire thing, running most of the samples. My copy has a number of post-it flags hanging out all over the place on topics that I want to re-explore or explore in more depth. I'm already planning on handing this off to co-workers so that they can learn the basics of working with spatial data as well.

The book is very clearly written. All the examples I tried worked. As I said before, Mr. Aitchison does a great job of explaining very difficult concepts so that even someone completely new to the topic will understand. That's the goal of a beginners book and it is very well met.

Now I want to see Intermediate Spatial please?

I think this book is good for someone new to GIS. The feeling I get is that the author is paid by number of pages so we get some additional things like creating Web applications in Visual Studio which maybe could have been left for another book and instead focus on SQL Server 2008 and the functionality.....

SRP => focus on SQL Server 2008 is my wish....

Summary worth reading to get started but where is the next step......

I will just start of by saying that this is a truly awesome book. Although I have tinkered a little with the new geospatial capabilities in a blog post, I did not really understand or know that there were some many nuances and things that you had to be careful about.
Did you know that there are different map projections? This book will show you the differences between the Hammer-Aitoff map projection, the Mercator map projection and the equirectangular map projection. You will also learn what the different spatial reference systems that SQL server 2008 supports are.

If you are a SQL server developer and you have to incorporate some spatial data on your website or perhaps on your intranet then this is the book for you. The book is written in a casual style, things that might seem complicated at first are explained thoroughly over several pages. There are many images in this book (we all know that an image is a thousand words) which really help explain concepts. There are links in this book that point to great resources.

I highly recommend this book if you want to learn about spatial data in SQL Server 2008. You will not be disappointed!

This is the only book that is dedicated to SQL Spatial in SQL Server 2008. It covers everything you need to know when working with Spatial Data. I definitely recommend this book to anyone working with spatial data using SQL Server!

The book provides a good introduction to spatial data and the specifics of working with it in the context. It extends to providing examples of ONE-WAY web apps with GoogleMaps and VirtualEarth, to offer read-only spatial data to browsers. It does not anticipate that one might want to obtain user input and write something back to a database, a rather significant oversight.

I was also disappointed to realize (after some digging; it might have been apparent from the publishing date, but the text doesn't highlight the fact) that his GoogleMaps API target was v2. That's OK, that was what was current when he wrote it, but the apress booksite doesn't seem to think a $30 to $50 code book needs any follow-up information. v3 should be covered at this point.

The text and the code (VB in print, but you can get C# from apress.com) both could have used more effective editing. Storytelling is fine, but this is a means to an end, not a novel.

If you are travelling into the SQL Server Spatial world, this is a good companion. I have found some very useful code I could use in my application in this book. I haven't read the book from cover to cover, I more use it as a reference to solve my problems, but what I have read does not seem that heavy to me. So I guess that one could say that this is not a heavy read. It seems an enjoyable read.

I picked up this book because I was doing a project for work that uses geocoding, maps and using some of the SQL 2008 spatial features such as selecting records with geo coordinates with in the bounds of a defined polygon. Of course at the time I didn't know anything about the way SQL spatial features worked so I had a lot of trial and error. Had I read just the first 2 chapters of this book back then, I would have saved so much time.

The first two chapters covers everything you need to know about geo spatial. Most interesting was the coverage of elipsoids and geoids that model the unique shape of the earth (no, it isnt round).

I skipped ahead a few times to look at chapters covering geocoding. Unfortuneatley, SQL does not geo code, but the chapter does cover how to write your own .NET CLR function to provide geocoding. Seems like it should have been part of SQL server, but oh well.

The book goes into great detail about each sub topic and the coverage is excellent. It does get into some .NET development, but not to the point that non developers wouldnt be able to handle it.

I recommend this book because it just works. It's an easy and interesting read. I truely thought it would be dry but it isnt.

Excellent book that starts with a good background on the concepts of the various geographies in the world. This background is expanded in a logical manner to cover the end to end concept of developing applications for use of spatial data. The reader is provided with good examples for processing with the myriad of data sources, visual and datasets, that exist on the internet.

The fact that the examples are developed using the Microsoft Express products for Visual Studio and SQL Server 2008 allows a user to test the examples without additonal cost is an additional plus.

I've been doing GIS work for 8 years now, pretty much solely using the ESRI software stack (SDE on SQL Server 2003/2005, coding with Python and C#). At a conference recently, I learned of ways to supposedly bypass the ESRI stack and update your GIS layers base tables using SQL Server 2008. I ran across this book at the conference bookstore and later ordered it. This book and the methodologies it provides have completely revolutionized how I update my GIS data in SQL Server. What would normally take many, many minutes (if not hours) to do programmatically through the ESRI stack (using Python, or ArcObjects through VBA or .NET) now takes seconds to just a few minutes to do by utilizing the power of the native SQL Server geometry and geography datatypes in stored procedures. This book does a good job of explaining the basics of geographic data and provides good working examples to get anyone even remotely familiar with SQL up and running with the SQL spatial data types. Alastair has a great informal writing style that makes this technical book easy to read. If you work with spatial data in ArcSDE on SQL Server 2008 and want to get introduced to the native spatial capabilities that your database can provide to you, this book is for you.

Alastair, write a "Advanced" book on this topic and I'll buy it!

Very good book. Has introduced us to and explained some of the basic concepts that we needed to understand as we begin to utilize spatial data in our environment.