Union all geometry in a SQL Server table like GeomUnion in Postgres

Question

Just to clarify up-front: I'm talking about unioning geometry, not the SQL keyword UNION.

I'm trying to move some spatial data from Postgres with PostGIS to SQL Server 2008. It was fine until I saw a statement like this:

SELECT GeomUnion(the_geom) FROM some_table

This unions all geometry in that column and return it as one result (similar to how COUNT works). As far I know, SQL Server only has the STUnion function, which unions one geometry with another. Is there any way to do something similar to the Postgres way?

If it helps, the STUnion function works like this:

SELECT first_geometry_column.STUnion(second_geometry_column) FROM some_table

Answer 1

The way I ended up doing this is with variables:

DECLARE @Shape GEOMETRY
SET @Shape = GEOMETRY::STGeomFromText('GEOMETRYCOLLECTION EMPTY', @MySrid)

SELECT @Shape = @Shape.STUnion(Shape)
  FROM MyShapeTable

It's not as nice, but it works.