Microsoft SQL Server 2008 adds built-in support for 2-dimensional spatial data types for both planar and geodetic geometries to address the increasing demands for managing location-aware data. SQL Server 2008 also adds indexing capabilities that, together with the necessary plan selections done by the query optimizer, provide efficient processing of spatial queries. This paper will present an overview of the spatial indexing implementation in SQL Server 2008 and outline how the indexing is implemented and how the cost-based query optimizer chooses among the different plans.