One more SQLSaturday done 🙂 I love SQLSaturdays, it’s always a fun experience for me. Uhm, ok, maybe let me qualify that. It’s always a nervewracking AND fun experience for me – when I’m speaking. I just always want it to be worth people’s time to attend my presentations.
I think there was a good crowd at my session, and I’m quite happy to see they seemed to have fun too (I hope!) …
I wanted to do a cool experiment on SSIS that I haven’t tried before. I am really interested in this whole mapping component on SSRS, and I know that most likely the biggest challenge of companies is how to geocode addresses that are already in their databases. So what I wanted to do was to try and retrieve lat/long information from public geocoding web services within SSIS.
Please note that the exercise below is purely for experimentation. Please read the restrictions of each of the geocoding services, and go with whichever is appropriate for your purpose.
Also this is a simplistic code to show you how to get the latitude/longitude information. On your own versions, test thoroughly and add the appropriate exception handlers.
Ok, let’s start.
1. Get your spatial data ready. If you’re just starting to work with spatial data and don’t have a handy .shp file, you can visit some of these sites which provide publicly available shapefiles:
http://www.vdstech.com/map_data.htm
http://wwwn.cdc.gov/epiinfo/script/shapefiles.aspx
http://www.mapcruzin.com/download-free-arcgis-shapefiles.htm
http://www.census.gov/geo/www/cob/bdy_files.html
2. Download the SQL Server Spatial Tools from ArcGIS, which include the Shape2SQL tool.
