Improving GeoServer SQL Server support
Dear All,
in recent times we were hired to improve GeoServer SQL Server support story.
The SQL Server store was created and maintained during spare time by Justin DeOliveira, however due to lack of production usage, and work time to pour on it, it failed to reach to the same level of robustness and speed as the best supported stores, such as Oracle and PostGIS.
Our work this week tried to close this gap with a number of little and big improvements that make the code run faster and in a more reliable way:
- add support for connection validation (very important for SQL Azure, which is very keen on closing pooled connections in your face)
- use binary encoding, instead of text, to transfer geometries from the database
- support for data paging at the database level
- make sure the rich database test suite we have in GeoTools is fully implented for SQL server, ensuring good support for use cases such as dynamic SQL views, proper date/time encoding in filters, and the like, both on the development series and on the stable series
Our develoment focused on testing the code against both SQL Server 2008 and SQL Azure. SQL Azure is the SQL database one can use in the Microsoft Azure cloud system: while it does look a lot like SQL Server 2008, it does not quite behave the same way in all cases, and requires a specific JDBC driver to work properly.
There are still some improvements missing on the table, such as geography columns support, but we’re sure you’ll be able to get more out of a production usage of GeoServer and SQL Server now.
Interested in sponsoring further improvements? Looking for professional support service that deliver for your group? Let us know!
The GeoSolutions team,
