Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

Representing Spatial Data in SQL Server 2012

The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) is a nonprofit, international, voluntary consensus standards organization that is leading the development of standards for geospatial and location-based services. The OGC defines different ways to represent geospatial information as bytes of data that can then be interpreted by the GEOMETRY or GEOGRAPHY types as being POINTS, LINESTRINGS, and so on. SQL Server 2012 supports three such formats:

Well-Known Text (WKT)

Well-Known Binary (WKB)

Geography Markup Language ...