Importing Spatial Data
There is a wide range of existing spatial data that can be readily imported and used in your SQL Server 2008 application. The following table lists just a few sources of freely-available spatial data that you can download via the Internet. These sources include information on a wide range of themes, including global political and administrative boundaries, water, transportation (roads, railways, and airports), and ecology and the environment.
| URL | Description |
|---|---|
| http://www.census.gov.uk | The US Census Bureau Geography Division has lots of high-quality spatial information, including a US Gazetteer, Zip Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTAs), and the TIGER database of streets, rivers, railroads, and many other geographic entities (United States only). |
| http://biogeo.berkeley.edu/bgm/gdata.php | The global administrative areas database (GADM) contains the boundaries of countries, states, counties, provinces, and their equivalents covering the whole world, and is available as a single ZIP file hosted at the University of California, Berkeley. |
| http://geodata.grid.unep.ch/ | The United Nations Geo Data Portal includes global, national, regional, and subregional statistics and spatial data, covering themes such as Freshwater, Population, Forests, Emissions, Climate, Disasters, Health, and GDP. |
| http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/ | The US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) GEOnet Names Server (GNS) is the official repository of all foreign place names, containing information about location, administrative division, and quality. |
| http://geodata.gov/wps/portal/gos | The US government “Geospatial One Stop” web page of geographic data contains classified links to a variety of sources covering areas including ecology, geology, health, transportation, and demographics. |
The only spatial formats directly supported by SQL Server 2008 are WKT, WKB, and GML. However, there are also several other formats in which spatial data such as that listed above is commonly supplied - including the ESRI Shapefile format, KML as used by Google Earth, and tabular, text-based formats.
In this chapter, I'll I'll tell you more about the various formats in which this data is provided, and show you the methods that you can use to import this data into SQL Server using third-party tools.
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