Those of you who use Microsoft SQL Server will be interested to hear that the SQL Server team has just released the November Community Technology Preview of SQL Server 2008 “Katmai”. Of special note for us GIS types is that this is the first publicly available release that includes support for the new spatial data types.
The last couple of weeks have seen a slew of news about this upcoming release, including some pretty interesting demonstrations of the new spatial data types. A good blog to keep your eye on is Isaac’s MSDN blog; he recently linked to a webcast that he gave on the 1st of November, titled “Introduction to Spatial in SQL Server”. This is a good place to start if you’re just being introduced to the new capabilities.
Here’s a link to the download.
I’ll be playing around with Virtual Earth and this release quite a bit over the next month and will post about my experiences here.