I spent a couple of hours this morning with a partner who wants to work with the Microsoft platform to deliver spatial business intelligence. Unlike some companies who have BI skills they are trying to extend into the spatial world, these guys are spatial experts who want to understand Microsoft’s capabilities. I mention this because… Read more
Following on from my my post on Monday I wanted to show you how to link reports together using the mapping control in Report Builder 3. This is actually pretty easy to do as any polygon or point on a map can have an action associated with it and one of the available action types… Read more
I spent a very interesting afternoon last week with the IT team at the RSPB to explore what they could do to combine their mapping data with the olap cubes they have in analysis services. The only out of the box solution in SQL Server for spatial data is the map control in reporting Services… Read more
I have had a couple of queries about spatial data in SQL Server regarding SRIDs. I have posted already on some of this here, and while I mentioned SRIDs I didn’t really cover what that means so hopefully this explains it… First of all the term Spatial Reference Identifier (SRID) is a European Petroleum Survey… Read more
The people we employ to run the country have decided to make a lot of the data they collect on our behalf freely available at Data.gov.uk. This data by itself is of limited use, however when combined with in house data in a business or academic institution and plotted on to a map then it… Read more
Storing and manipulating spatial data into SQL Server 2008 is fairly straightforward, thanks to its new data types, methods and indexing. However presenting this data is more of a challenge; showing your users a grid of latitude/longitudes isn’t really going to help and so you need to put your data on a map. The obvious… Read more
The best thing about my job is the interesting people I get to meet and this weekend was no exception, because I went to an EcoCamp in Coventry and met an arctic explorer and some amazing industrial designers amongst others. You might wonder what that has got to do with my work? Well strictly nothing,… Read more
This article shows you how to get started with Report Builder 3 (RB3) and Bing Maps. I could use adventure works to show you this but I thought you might want to see a little bit of our green and pleasant land instead. To do this I have put the previous SQLBits venues into a… Read more
I have been at TechEd Berlin last week and when I wasn’t speaking I spent most of the time in the Learning Centre (TLC) or ask the experts. I must confess I felt a bit of a non-expert this year for two reasons; I have been spending time getting up to speed on the new… Read more
A lot of the things you need to do with SQL Server may well have been done before even if it’s using the new features in the new version , SQL Server 2008. The challenge is to find this stuff and be able to make use of that earlier effort and a key resource… Read more