Loading Ordnance Survey open data into SQL Server, using the geography type

Ordnance Survey have been providing free to use mapping data and it’s great that this data is publicly available and regularly updated. As someone who works with SQL Server daily, I wanted to load this data into SQL Server, using the spatial types.

OS provide this data in the ESRI Shapefile format, which unfortunately is not supported by SQL Server out of the box. With a little bit of conversion, it’s still possible to load this data into SQL Server.

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