Geometry vs Geography

In the last few months I often received the question: “What datatype do I need to use? Geometry or Geography?”. The answer I gave them, is the most used answer in the IT world: “It depends…”. Because the answer isn’t as easy as you might think…

 
Storage
The storage of both Geometry and Geography is the same. Even though they’re functionality is different, the system datatypes are the same:

SELECT *
FROM sys.types
WHERE system_type_id = 240

The content you will find in a Geometry or Geography column is binary. But by using a number of different methods, you can easily convert this to readable text.

 
Performance
Looking at performance, it could be an easy choice: Geometry will win this. The basic polygons aren’t that different. The extended methods on the other hand, do make a big difference! This is a whole different world, so I’ll write an article about this in the upcoming weeks.

Bob Beauchemin (Blog | @bobbeauch) also gave a session about this, and he had some great examples to illustrate this. You might want to watch his Spatial Data sessions!

 
Functionality
If you’re looking for the biggest difference between the two datatypes, you’ll see it’s the functionality. A Geometry object is just a 2D, flat polygon. This means, it doesn’t matter if you take a country on top of the earth (for example Canada, which is “curved”), or a country close to the Equator (for example Brazil, which is “flat”).

A Geography object on the other hand, is a 3D (or even 4D) polygon, that has the same curve as the shape of the earth. That means that the difference between 2 point isn’t calculated in a straight line, but it’s need to consider the curvature of the earth.

A great example of this concept, is shown by Morten Nielsen (Blog | @dotMorten) on his blog. He made a tool (Shape2Sql, downloadable from his his blog), that can be used to import shape files into SQL Server.

He explains the difference between Geometry and Geography with 2 pictures, where he draws a straight line between Europe and the USA:

Geometry

Geography

As you can see, the straight line is actually a straight line if you use Geometry (planar system). But if you use Geography (spherical system), the line isn’t straight but curved. This could become an issue if you want to know the distance between Berlin and Los Angeles, and you use Geometry data to calculate this. If you use that to calculate the amount of fuel for your plane, you might end up swimming the last part of your journey!

Popping The big question
The big question you need to ask yourself is: “want do I want to do with this?”. If you want to use it just for visualization purposed, you might want to stick with Geometry data. It’s accurate, fast, and doesn’t require difficult calculations. But if you need to calculate distances across the globe, or data that represents the earth, then Geography is the way to go.

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