I presented ‘Going Spatial with SQL Server 2008’ at SQL Saturday #48 in Columbia, SC this past weekend and had a really great time. Big thanks go out to K. Brian Kelley and the SQL Saturday organizers, speakers, volunteers and attendees for making this such a great opportunity to learn and network. I understand that any event of this size involves a tremendous amount of hard work…a lot of which goes unnoticed if everything runs smoothly, which it certainly did.
Special thanks also to those who attended my session yesterday. I wanted to go ahead and post the presentation along with the code which was shared so you can continue to explore using spatial data. Click here to download the files.
There were a couple of questions which came up at the end of the talk which I wanted to include here. One was around being able to pull spatial data out of SQL Server and transform them into KML. I suggested starting with the SQL Server Spatial Tools project which does have some KML processing options included but they may only be for importing of KML data into SQL Server. For exporting, you may want to look at the SQL Server to KML project.
Another question came up around production-izing the geocoding logic that we covered during the presentation. One of the challenges that you’ll face as you start geocoding thousands of addresses at a time is dealing with daily query limits that service providers will enforce. These are often in the form of X Number of Requests / 24 hours. So, you’ll need to be sure to only geocode a certain number of addresses per day. Also, if your requests come in at too fast of a rate (100 in a minute, let’s say), then your requests can also be denied. Most services have a specific response status that tells you that you’re being denied for this very reason. As such, if you want to production-ize mass nightly geocoding, you’ll need to build in some throttling logic that will manage this situation. I haven’t posted any logic around doing something like this but will look to post this soon for anyone who might be interested.
As for the sessions that I attended, I really enjoyed Jessica Moss’s ‘Making Reporting Services Work For You’, Mark Tabladillo’s ‘Data Mining with PowerPivot 2010’ and Andy Warren’s ‘Creating a Professional Development Plan’. To be honest, I didn’t realize until I went to Andy’s session that he had actually sat in on my presentation and that he liked it. I had a slight Sally Field moment…’He liked it…he really really liked it.’ I also got some really good feedback on the presentation from the attendees and am really looking forward to expanding on the topic for future events. Thanks again, everybody, and well done!