SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 Integration Services - Consuming Web Services Using Script Task

The omnipresent nature of Web-based technologies expanded the concept of distributed environments with the ability to utilize services hosted on remote servers accessible via standard Internet protocols. This capability can be easily leveraged in SQL Server 2008 R2 Integration Services by employing Web Services Task, whose characteristics have already been covered in detail on this forum. However, in some cases, it might be required to reference Web Services directly from within a Script Task code. We will describe how such a need can be accommodated in this article.


http://www.databasejournal.com/features/mssql/sql-server-2008-web-services-script-task.html

Geocode Addresses in T-SQL

This article shows how you can "geocode" street address information natively in T-SQL with MS SQL 2005, and as a byproduct, how you can validate, normalize, and parse address information.

Note that this approach will work in SQL 2008 as well, though SQL 2008 provides geospatial types and functions that could be used in lieu of the numeric data type used here.

Geocoding is the process of converting a geographical address into latitude and longitude (GPS coordinates). Geocoding address information has a number of benefits:

• Means to interoperate with web-based mapping services
• Means to interoperate with GPS devices
• Makes it possible to calculate distance between addresses
• Makes geospatial analysis possible (i.e. identifying geographically similar addresses, etc.
• Compact way to represent a geographical location
• And more...

Calling a Web Service from within SQL Server

More and more shops are implementing web services. Doing this provides an architecture that allows applications to consume services to retrieve data. These services could be within your own organization or from a business partner. One of the problems you might run into when building applications that consume web services is how you can use web services data within a SQL Server instance. One of the reasons you might want to do this is so you can join a record set that is returned from a web service with one of your SQL Server tables. This can easily be done within an application, but how do you do this within a stored procedure that only runs within the context of SQL Server. In this article I will discuss one approach for doing this.