Before Microsoft SQL Server 2005 comes up, users of this database wanting to handle spatial data had basically 3 options:
- ESRI ArcSDE – which means purchasing SDE licenses and probably some other ESRI product for data maintenance
- TerraLib – an OpenSource option including TerraView as default user interface. But, just like ArcSDE, TerraLib has its own data access model and won´t permit the use of spatial SQL
- or upgrade to SQL Server 2008 and finally enable spatial support natively from Microsoft
