Geospatial World

Finally... There is an Update (Service Pack) available for MapGuide Enterprise 2009 which should address many issues people have been experiencing.  There are actually 3 downloads available:  Server Update Webserver Extensions Update MapGuide Studio Update General information can be found here . Take care, Warren M AU 40 days and counting...

So I figured it was time to get SQL Server 2008 Spatial up and running on my machine.  After installing a few pre-requisites (Windows PowerShell, MS Installer 4.5, etc) I was able to upgrade my current SQL Server 2005 Express, to SQL Server 2008 Express. The install went fairly smoothly with the expcetion of not installing the SQL Server Management Studio Express (SSMSE).  After a quick Google search it was apparent this was a common problem, and you simply needed to re-run the install and choose to install the Management Tools - Basic (which btw, I did not recall seeing during the original upgrade, so I'm not sure if this is by design or not?) Once SSMSE was installed I fired up Map 2009, and Bulk Copied some data from a previous SQL Server Schema (non-spatial), and was able to create a non FDO schema and dumped some data into it. I was pleasantly surprised whn I popped back into SSMSE and found the Spatial Results tab on one of the tables I selected.  This tab provides a nice gra...

For those who have installed the Survey Toolkit for Map 3D you might have noticed that when you use the '3D Surface' command that the raster is generated, but it does not get added to the Display Manager.  If you check the Data Connect window, you will see that the Raster is actually connected, it's just not added to the drawing.  The following link provides a hotfix to address this issue:  Survey Toolkit Add Layer Hot Fix Take care, Warren M AU in 48 days

I was recently working with a client who was generating Map 3D surfaces from a SHP point file DEM.   These SHP files were based on the Canadian NTS sheets, and as such it took 4 sheets to cover the area they were working with.   There was a problem once all of the raster surfaces were put together. As you can see from the image, there were resulting ‘gaps’ between the 4 surfaces.    This is likely happening because the dem points do not form a uniform boundary at the edges defined by the NTS sheets.    So, how can we resolve this?   I thought what if we could merge the 4 separate SHP files into a single SHP file?   How might I do this without any Arc* tools?   I suppose one option would be to import all of the SHP files into Map, and then export them out as a single SHP file.   But…   that’s too much work, and the datasets might be too big to bring all of this into Map.    So, off to trusty ‘ol Google and search for some information on merging SHP files.   Well, wasn’t I surprised wh...

Earlier this week at the FOSS4G conference taking place in Cape Town, South Africa, Autodesk announced the availability of 2 new FDO Providers through the subscription program: Autodesk FDO Provider for GE Smallworld and Autodesk FDO Provider for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 . “The latest FDO Providers allow customers to take advantage of the native support for additional spatial data formats -- and let users more easily access, view, edit and analyze data -- within Autodesk geospatial software.” Take Care, Warren AU in 59 days

While I have been unable to find any direct information from the Microsoft website regarding a lack of support for arc segments in the new SQL Server 2008 Spatial, I did find a few posts on the Microsoft Tech Forums, and one specifically from Isaac Kunen stating that arcs are not supported, and are a high priority item for the next release. Personnaly, I think this a deal-breaker for many organizations, and I believe it would be in Microsoft's best interest to address this shortcoming sooner, rather than later. Here ia another great comparison document that cross compares  SQL Server 2008 Spatial, PostgreSQL/PostGIS 1.3-1.4, MySQL 5-6 Take Care, Warren AU in 60 days