Adding Geocoded Information to Your Applications

Nearly all of our important data has some sort of geographic component to it. Customers have addresses, stores are grouped into regions, and trucks follow known paths. Whether we're building the next great social site or routing truck drivers, we need a way to translate the human usable address information into latitude and longitude, which can be consumed by machines. This process is known as geocoding, and fortunately all we need to do is call an API to make this happen. SQL Server even has a special data type for storing our geographic data. In this session, we'll review several of the more popular geocoding APIs, and how to store the data in SQL Server. We'll then create a simple application to consume the API, display and store the data. By the end of this session, you'll be ready to begin adding geocoding to your own applications!