Microsoft SQL Server Spatial update

I attended the Microsoft SQL Server SIG at the ESRI User Conference to hear a short update from Ed Katibah, who is leading the development of the SQL Server spatial capabilities. I thought he said a few interesting things of note, which I hadn't heard elsewhere. One was that they are doing nightly performance tests against all their major competitors, including Oracle, Postgres, Informix and DB2, and, while he wasn't allowed to be specific, he was "very pleased" with the results. He showed an example of a polygon with 600,000 vertices and 7,000 holes, and said that it could be intersected with an offset version of itself in 15 seconds on a 1GHz machine. From the way Ed described the spatial indexing approach, I suspect that it will probably do a pretty good job on this problem of Paul Ramsey's, though I'm sure it would take more than that for Paul to consider a Microsoft solution :) ! He mentioned that Microsoft was rejoining OGC - they had left because of legal concerns relating to how OGC handled certain IP issues, but these had now been resolved. He said that the target for release was middle of next year, and that there was a very strong focus within Microsoft on meeting that deadline. Both Ed and various ESRI people mentioned that Microsoft and ESRI had been working together to ensure that ESRI would support the SQL Server Spatial capabilities.