You have my permission to skip this post. This one’s just for me. So I’ve been drawing again with SQL Server’s spatial results tab, the first time I posted something was with Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in More images from the Spatial Results Tab.

Why Michael??

Because it’s a stupid challenge and I wanted to see what I could do with it. The SSMS spatial tab is a lousy crummy medium for images. It really is quite terrible and using SSMS to draw imposes restrictions and rules. It’s fun to see what I can do by staying within that framework. It’s something to push against just because it’s challenging. Others do crosswords, This week, I did this.

Why Now?

I realized a couple things lately.

The Colors Seem Dull … But Don’t Have to Be

I used to think the spatial results tab uses lousy colors, pastel and dull. I realized that they’re not dull, they’re just transparent. I can overlap polygons inside a geometry collection to get more solid colors. Here are the top 100 colors without transparency.

The Colors Seem Arbitrary … But Don’t Have to Be

The palette that SSMS uses is terrible. It’s almost as if the nth color is chosen using something like Color.FromArgb(new Random(n).Next()); Notice that color 6 and 7 (the beige colors on the left side of the grid) are almost indistinguishable from each-other. But I can use that. I can overlap different colors to get the color I need. And I can write a program to pick the best combination of overlaps. Here’s a nice red and blue:

But black remains difficult.

Curves Are Supported Now

I can use arc segments called CIRCULARSTRING . SVG files mostly use Bézier curves which cannot be translated easily to arc segments.

Here’s a logo that I rebuilt using arcs instead of Bézier curves:



For some reason, if you begin to use CIRCULARSTRING , then the transparent colors won’t blend with itself (just other colors).

Also arc segments are rendered as several small line segments anyway, so for my purposes, it’s not a super feature.

Polly

One last picture/query of a scarlet macaw. Click on it or any other picture in this post to get the query that generated it.

