First there's the old news:
ArcGIS Server (ArcSDE technology) will support the PostgreSQL database at the ArcGIS 9.3 release.Then there's the good news:
The enterprise geodatabase and all of its standard capabilities will be fully supported. It will be OGC/ISO compliant and the PostGIS geometry type will be supported.Yay! You can work with PostGIS columns via SDE and then push the data out to other PostGIS enabled tools, like Mapserver or Hibernate or GRASS! And then finally, the bad news:
In addition, ESRI will also provide its own spatial type for storing geometries in PostgreSQL.Gah! Ouch! It burns! There aren't "special" types for Informix or DB2, why for PostgreSQL/PostGIS? Unlike Oracle, we are ready and willing to add the features to PostGIS necessary to fully support ArcSDE's spatial SQL needs. And if you don't trust Refractions, PostGIS is open source, so you could just do it yourselves! Hop in the pool, guys, supporting open source is not just about software, it is about community participation, everyone rowing in the same direction so nobody has to row too hard by themselves.
7 comments:
Seems to me that maybe Jachym Cepicky is right on the money.
I know, I told you in an email a while ago that I would defend ESRI's right to become a FOSS4G sponsor, and look what happened, they decided to sponsor. Well, I hope they are there to genuninely listen, not just to spread marketing messages all over the place.
Maybe the thing to do is have the OSGeo crowd invite ESRI over for a tet-a-tet during Where to see where the ESRI/FOSS relationship is meant to go.
Is this Embrace Extend Extinguish ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
Allan, this is "tête-à-tête" :-)
satri - you know, I thought it looked funny... thanks for the French lesson!
No, it is not embrace, extend, extinguish, it's just a mistake. The ST_GEOMETRY type in Oracle has hardly been a raging success, and I don't imagine the one in PostgreSQL will be any different. What it *will* be is confusing to ArcSDE users, and eventually a waste of effort for developers who have to support a whole new type in order to interoperate directly against the database layer.
Paul,
IMO
I think that you are reading too much into this.
ESRI provide ArcSDE Geometry Storage options for a number of DBMS. I'm assuming that this will be the same with PostGRES.
In the end it will be the decision of the implementing organisation as to how they want their data to be stored.
For example; with Oracle you have the option of storing your data via ArcSDE Compressed Binary, Oracle Spatial or OGC Well Known Binary; with SQL Server, we have ArcSDE Compressed Binary or OGC Well Known Binary.
It seems to me based on the info available that we'll have the same options with PostGRES, ... and we can decide how we'll implement it.
I think that this is a good move by ESRI and will give us migration options in the future.
Bruce Bannerman
Any clarification coming out of the ESRI conference?
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