SQL Server
Last weekend I spent my Sunday morning enjoying “Breakfast at Wimbledon” watching the Men’s Tennis Championship Final between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. It started off normal enough: with a good old British rain delay. That did not stop the strawberries and cream coming out, however. Little did I know, but “Breakfast at Wimbledon” (affectionately labeled because of the time difference here in the USA) would eventually turn into “Dinner at Wimbledon”. Not just because of the rain delays, but because the match turned into the greatest tennis match I have ever seen. When the rain tent was covering the hallowed grass on Centre Court, it gave me time to explore the Official IBM Wimbledon website a bit more and it got me thinking about spatial data types. I am a tennis fan but I am also a geek.
IBM has worked with the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club (there’s a mouthful!) since 1990 but it’s really in the last decade that the web site has really evolved. During the Wimbledon tournament the web site receives over 100 times the activity of a normal week, with 8.6 million unique individuals visiting the site and spending an average of 86 minutes online during the 2 weeks of the tournament. Of course, there’s now live feed video and match tracking across all courts with player interviews and in-depth statistics available on demand. The feature that really got me interested was the SlamTracker.
Within the SlamTracker you can track the scores of multiple matches and even watch those multiple feeds as they are streamed live. The website scoreboard is displayed, of course, in “Wimbledon Green” and is made to look like the old fashioned scoreboards of days gone by, a nice touch, even though technology has moved on. The scoreboards displayed on the web site match those exactly which are being displayed to the spectators actually on court. Under “Match Stats” you can explore, interactively, a players 1st Serve percentage, winning percentage on 1st and 2nd serves, or how often they are successfully “approaching the net” (a key stat for those tennis players out there!).
There’s even a “Serve Stats” tab so you can analyze where successful serves are landing in the court and the speed of each serve. (Roger Federer served up two 129 mph aces during the final, both hitting the middle line precisely). These serves and their strike locations are displayed on a graphical tennis court with mouse-over action to display the individual speeds of each serve. Very cool. I can imagine even players themselves using this facility to analyze their own or their opponent’s tennis traits.
This is just the kind of data that can be stored with the new Spatial data types in Microsoft SQL Server 2008. When we think of the new data types “Geometry” and “Geography”, it is easy to think of mapping applications like Google Earth (ok, Microsoft has Virtual Earth too) using GPS coordinates but this is just the type of application where storing spatial coordinates is necessary too. Of course, IBM is using DB2 for Wimbledon, but later this year we will be able to do the same with Microsoft’s database too.
That’s good news for the future, just like next year’s introduction of a retractable roof over Centre Court!
TTFN
Brian
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