Global Mapper is more than just a utility; it has built in functionality for distance and area calculations, raster blending, feathering, spectral analysis, elevation querying, line of sight calculations, cut-and-fill volume calculations, as well as advanced capabilities like image rectification, contour generation from surface data, view shed analysis, watershed delineation, sea level rise modeling, terrain layer comparison, and triangulation and gridding of 3D point data. Global Mapper 15, released September 18th features a ton of great new functionality and is the largest Global Mapper release to date. Version 15.1 features a variety of updates to both the Global Mapper base product and the Global Mapper LiDAR Module. New support for MS SQL Server Spatial databases means that Global Mapper now supports all available spatial database types. The powerful path profile tool enhancements include 3D support for a path profile for displaying separate terrain surfaces. This allows easily comparing the surface of multiple loaded terrain layers along a path. This release also features added support for specifying to sample elevations from gridded terrain surfaces along a corridor in the path profile to easily get the minimum, maximum, or average elevation surrounding the path. An update to the Mathematical Raster Calculator released at version 15 includes support for calculations from elevation grid layers. The release includes dramatically sped up raster/elevation exports cropped to complex area features important for very complex areas (i.e. hundreds or thousands of vertices) the exports may be 10x as fast or even better! This release also has new built-in links to several online cloud based data sources, including all NASA GIBS (Global Imagery Browse) sources, Landsat8 imagery and Lidar data (new Lidar group in dialog) from the USGS EarthExplorer web site, and GlobCover ESA2009 Land Cover data. The update includes an attribute setup tab for the Shapefile export to allow customizing exported attribute types and lengths as well as many other updates. The new LiDAR module released with version 15 leverages the 3D updates to the path profile and also includes a new selection option on path profile dialog with Lidar points shown to select by drawing a polygon, support for loading Leica PTS point cloud files and a new option when batch converting to Lidar LAS/LAZ files to apply color from loaded imagery.