Monday, June 28, 2010

Loading ANSS Earthquake Data Into SQL Server 2008 - Spatial Ed - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Relevant to those in Canada that experienced the earthquake, here is how to generate spatial reports using a free feed from ANSS.

The Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS) maintains a comprehensive catalog of worldwide seismic events (typically earthquakes) which is a good source of spatial data for SQL Server 2008.  The ANSS Composite Catalog (formerly called the CNSS Earthquake Catalog) provides a search capability which allows the download of seismic events, from 1898 to present, using various search terms. In this post I will cover the following topics:

  • Download ANSS seismic data
  • Prepare the downloaded ANSS data
  • Create a database table for the ANSS data
  • Load the ANSS data
  • Add, update and index the spatial data column
  • Sample spatial queries on the ANSS data
  • Loading ANSS Earthquake Data Into SQL Server 2008 - Spatial Ed - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

    Friday, June 25, 2010

    Jas Dhalliwal's Blog : Planetary Cloud: The Rise of the Billion-Node Machine

    What if the whole planet was a grid computing effort?  Alternatively, what if the grid computing power of the planet was stored on a single chip?

    Two thoughts that might just change the world.

    Planetary IT, not just Public Clouds, may well be the next big thing. The ability to get the IT resources of the planet working on problems such as genome sequencing, climate challenges, simulation for nuclear fusion, spaceship design amongst others with a billion-node system composed each of 1000-cores is like getting a brain the size of the entire Earth working for a fraction of a second to find potential solutions to our most challenging concerns of today. This affects everyone. This is the Rise of the Billion-Node Machine – the billion-node IT nexus serving the planet.

    Jas Dhalliwal's Blog : Planetary Cloud: The Rise of the Billion-Node Machine

    Scale up, scale out.