I saw a note this week that spatial support is coming to SQL Azure. This will be in the SU3 update that appears to be scheduled for June. We'll see, and I wouldn't be planning on that for a hard date, but if you have a spatial application and are looking to distribute the load of this data to the cloud, you'll have that ability.

That makes me wonder what the SQL Azure platform truly runs on. Is it SQL Server 2008? Or some port of SQL Server 2008 that is slowly getting features? Or is it some SQL Server 2005 installation that is being upgraded this summer to 2008? I can't help but wonder what version is missing spatial support? It also brings to mind the issue of the cloud updating their service on their schedule. That's certainly a concern.

One of the caveats of using Azure is that you might not want to insert too much data at once and risk losing your connection. That is a little disconcerting, and I think issues like this, or warnings, are some of the reasons people are nervous about using databases in a cloud system.

However Azure could offer some interesting features. Perhaps they could easily load your database for you (or provide you a copy of a second one) that featured location data for a country. Or for an area. Imaging checking a box and having all roads/cities along with a set of functions pre-loaded into you database? That could make for some very interesting applications that might excite new developers.

I think Azure will grow, and be useful in certain applications, especially web based ones. If there are some features that you can think of for spatial applications, drop a note in the discussion below.

Steve Jones

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The MCM Class - Check out Brent Ozar's blog for his experiences up in Seattle as he goes through the MCM class for SQL Server.