MapInfo Professional for Microsoft SQL Server is basically a superset of functions to MapInfo Professional that make SQL Server databases as easy to access as regular MapInfo tables. It is designed to provide secure, multi-user access to map data for non-technical end users. Users can select map data from SQL Server tables using spatial operators (within window, object selection, intersection, etc.), view the resulting maps locally, make edits, and see changes made by other users as needed. Database administrators can control data access centrally so security and data integrity issues are simplified.

What Happened to SpatialWare?
SpatialWare®, MapInfo’s current solution for providing spatial capability in enterprise database systems, isn’t going away. SpatialWare is still the choice for MapInfo users wishing to store, share and query map data from Oracle and IBM Informix RDBMS, and is more cost effective for SQL Server databases when there are more than 40 users. Developers working with MapX or MapXtreme or turnkey MapBasic applications will still use SpatialWare in cases where they need to access more complicated objects other than points from their databases. The big difference is that MapInfo for SQL Server is end user oriented while SpatialWare provides more programmatic control for developers and power users.

No News for the Other Enterprise DBMS
According to MapInfo product manager Jason Weinberger, SQL Server was chosen first for direct support due to its popularity in the market. For the others enterprise scale database products, full map data support can be added to Oracle 9i and Informix with SpatialWare, but otherwise only point data (X, Y coordinates) and attribute data can be accessed via ODBC. When asked about supporting map data stored in Open Source RDBMS such as IBM’s DB2, MySQL and PostgreSQL, Weinberger said that there are no plans for those yet.

Price and availability
Both MapInfo Professional and the special SQL Server version went on sale last June, and can be obtained directly from MapInfo or any authorized MapInfo Partner. The price for MapInfo Professional is $1495 (upgrades from 6.5 are $495), and the SQL Server extension costs $500 more. It will run on Windows 98, 2000, NT 4.0 SP6, and Windows XP Professional. Minimum hardware is a Pentium class PC, 32MB (64MB for XP), and requires 304 MB of disk space. For more details see http://www.mipro.com or contact your nearest reseller.