geographika

The SQL Server 2008 plugin for MapServer is a “native driver modeled on the PostGIS driver to support SQL Server 2008’s newly added spatial capabilities.” It works fine for displaying data as WMS layers in OpenLayers however I ran into all sorts of problems when trying to use the GetFeatureInfo WMS query.

With MapServer 5.2.1  (installed using MapServer for Windows – MS4W v2.3.1) no error message was returned, however neither was any data . I initially thought this was due to the following bug in the plugin, which was reported to have been fixed for MapServer 5.4.

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I’ve been working more and more with the SQL Server 2008 spatial queries. For standard queries I now rarely use the graphic design tools available in SQL Server Management Studio – SQL scripts are far quicker, and easier to reuse. For spatial queries I don’t think there even is a GUI. Anyway the following SQL snippets may be of use to someone. I have only been using the GEOMETRY type, so these may not be relevant to the GEOGRAPHY type, for a distinction see this Microsoft document.

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A current project I’ve been developing uses a combination of SQL Server 2008 and MapServer (for Windows) to serve many WMS layers. As much as it irks developers, web users only care about two things – how nice the site looks, and how fast it is. Whether the correct information is displayed comes a poor third..

I’ve found a number of tweaks that have dramatically improved the WMS creation speed. In these examples I’m using a table in SQL Server 2008 with 50773 features (Irish Townlands if you’re asking).

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