Im trying to get familiar with spatial data using sql server 2008.
I use book: http://www.beginningspatial.com/
and there is sample data: http://www.census.gov/geo/cob/bdy/zt/z500shp/zt06_d00_shp.zip
I uploaded it to my sql server database and Spatial results are presented well. Everything seems to be ok but when I tried to calculate distance between 2 geometries result is really small.
For example 0.27
The same is if I try to calculate STLength of given region. Result also is very small like 0.19 for example.
I wonder why the results are so small. I used SRID 4269 importing data.
Does anyone have any idea why is it like that ? I think that the result whould be in meters.
Thanks for any advice
STLength returns units in the data source’s unit of measure. In your case, you chose SRID 4326, which stores the data in latitude/longitude, therefore your base units are a “degree”, not a standard linear unit like feet/meters. To calculate the distance in linear units, you should load your data as a projected format.
You might want to refer to this very similar question, as well.