# TIL how to find latitude and longitude of a geolocation stored in SQL Server

I was recently working with an EF Core entity which contained a C# `Point` property representing a geolocation. This was stored in a single column in a SQL Server database. (I think this uses `NetTopologySuite`, judging by the [EF Core Spatial Data documentation](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/ef/core/modeling/spatial).)

I wanted to know where this geolocation actually is, and the easiest way I know is to convert it to latitude and longitude then look it up online. That raises the question, how can I get the latitude and longitude from the value in the SQL Server database?

If you look at the value of the geolocation in the database, it looks like this:

```
0xE6100000010C635A400D847555403847C263E4453440
```

That, of course, is gibberish to me, but happily there is an easy way to get the latitude and longitude from this value. Today I learnt it's built–in functionality within SQL Server!

```sql
SELECT TOP 1
    GeoLocation.Lat  AS Latitude,
    GeoLocation.Long AS Longitude,
    GeoLocation
FROM MyTable;
```

| Latitude | Longitude | GeoLocation |
|----|----|----|
| 85.8361848 | 20.2730162 | 0xE6100000010C635A400D847555403847C263E4453440 |

SSMS also has a Spatial Results tab which looks interesting. I'm not sure what to do with it, and I haven't looked into it because I didn't need it for what I was trying to do, but as always I like to know what tools exist that might be useful to me in the future.

As an aside, if you're struggling to find this geolocation on a map, that might be because it's in the Arctic Ocean. In the Northern hemisphere, latitude is a number from 0 (equator) to 90 (North Pole) so a latitude of 85 is pretty far North. This is why I ended up investigating this particular value in the database, because the location which this is *intended* to represent is, in fact, on land and nowhere near the North Pole.