Spatial Search made easy with Google Maps API and SQL Server 2008

Spatial search is the process of searching locations nearby to a position in space. A good example of a spatial search would be finding all of the restaurants near your present location. With Google’s Maps API and SQL Server’s Geography data types we can build a quick spatial search in no time. In this little exercise I will be detecting the user’s location, displaying it on a map and suggesting nearby restaurants. Since not all browsers support the W3C standards I will also allow manual input of the user’s address. Spatial search relies on latitude and longitude which are the global position coordinates. The process of turning an address to a set of latitude and longitude coordinates is referred to as Geocoding