The last blog entry was very popular and there were lots of requests for some introductory information on the spatial data types. 

Well Known Text Or Binary
I am going to use the GEOMETRY data type over POINT, LINESTRING, or POLYGON as it can store any of those three while the other three can only contain data matching their name (so POINT can holds only point data, etc.). The values are stored in an internal geometry format but it takes wither WKT or WKB formatted data.

Those are Well-Known Text (WKT) or Well-Known Binary (WKB) formats repectively. I am hoping most of your are better with text than binary so the following examples demonstrate how to insert geometry values into a table by converting WKT values to internal geometry format.

So let us start with a …