Spatial data is data that describes a location. It is said that 80% of the world’s data has a spatial element to it, so you can see how, for many data-tier applications, the ability to construct or interrogate spatial data may be critical. In this chapter, I will give an overview of spatial data and its implementation in SQL Server, before looking at the spatial standards that are used in the SQL Server implementation.
Note
This chapter is intended to provide a theoretical overview of spatial data. Practical examples of usage can be found in Chapter 11.
