Mateusz Loskot :: hacking on, working out, living up

How PostGIS can help SQL Server users?

03 Feb 2010 | mloskot

I may be a gonzo or it’s just that today I didn’t have my notorious 4th coffee in my favourite Winnie The Pooh cup I got from Pantera on our 14th (or 15th?) anniversary we celebrated a month ago, so…

Apparently, there are situations in which PostGIS could be an affordable anti-GML vaccine jab. It seems there is a potential market for PostGIS to conquer. Perhaps it wouldn’t be estimated as profitable as the H1N1 but who knows what will happen if no one takes a brave stand and stop GML designers! Here I’d eagerly conclude with one of the famous Scottish sentences :-)

Back to the subject matter. Today, I spotted an interesting question on the StackOverflow archives: Is it possible to export spatial data from Sql Server 2008 in gml2 format?. Natively? No, there is no such solution. Presumably, Microsoft thinks forward and thinks GML 2 is a legacy standard. Fair enough, someone has to draw a line between prehistoric and modern, somewhere. Why Microsoft? Again?

Facing such a tremendous suffer Microsoft exposed SQL Server users to, I suggested to visit the “underworld” for a while and hire PostGIS to do the dirty job.

Paraphrasing Andrei Alexan­dres­cu’s, hysterically famous recently, sentence: SQL Server should go!.

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