I have read some articles about using spatial optimized tables. Actually I use stored latitude and longitude as varchar
comma-separated (lat;lng).
Could you suggest the best way to perform this change and enumerate the advantages. It's really necessary for a large project or only move to SQL Server 2008?
thanks.
I'd add two new persisted computed colunns to your table as illustrated in the demo below.
create table Demo (
LatLng varchar(100),
Lat as CAST(LEFT(LatLng, charindex(';',LatLng)-1) as float) PERSISTED,
Lng as CAST(SUBSTRING(LatLng, charindex(';',LatLng)+1, LEN(LatLng)-charindex(';',LatLng)) as float) PERSISTED
)
insert into Demo
(LatLng)
values
('33.0000;15.222222')
select *
from Demo
drop table Demo