Question

I’m looking at implementing spatial queries in .NET without using SQL2008. The first requirement is to be able to create a (BTree styled) spatial index and be able to query it.

Although SQL 2008 ships with .NET libraries for the types, you need to use SQL for the spatial indexes.

Has anybody used any .NET libraries for spatial data (OS or commercial)? I am looking at NetTopologySuite but it looks quiet and I don’t want a dead library.

Answer 1

SharpMap is a (well known and used) OpenSource collection of spatial libraries for .NET

http://www.codeplex.com/SharpMap

Commercial libraries from ESRI would be the most widely used.
Can I ask why you don’t want to use SQL for creating spatial indexes?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb964712.aspx

If you don’t want to create indexes in the database then you will be stuck using shapefiles:

http://mapserver.org/utilities/shptree.html

Update

I’ve not used NTS or JTS, but there is also a C++ implementation of JTS at http://trac.osgeo.org/geos/ which has an active user community, and I’ve used on a couple of projects.

Shapely http://gispython.org/shapely/manual.html builds on GEOS in Python. If you are doing everything in “the cloud” then it may be worth reading this article – http://sgillies.net/blog/986/manipulimization-of-whatchamacallems/

Re indexes – I found SQL Server + spatial indexes to outperform shapefile + indexes with the same data. If you require the indexes for displaying data then tile caches would perform far better than any indexing.

Python seems to have become one of the key languages in GIS. There is also an R-type index library – http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Rtree/