Running ArcSDE With PostgreSQL and MySQL
I’m not sure why but I’ve gotten a couple emails asking me about running ArcSDE on PostgreSQL or MySQL. I’m sure it is because any Google search for ArcSDE with PostgreSQL or MySQL gives you my blog as a reference. Our clients almost always have an Oracle or SQL Server licenses so its not a big deal for them, but being part of a very small company, paying Oracle for a couple enterprise licenses kills us. I’m sure if a big ESRI client (or government) asked ESRI for ArcSDE on either PostgreSQL or MySQL it would happen. For now we’ll just have to sit back and hope there is something going on inside ESRI to enable ArcSDE on either database (my preference is PostgreSQL, but I know some are in love with MySQL). I’ve heard rumblings in the past that there was plans for ArcSDE to run on either database, but I asked around at the Dev Summit and was told there were no plans.
I’m hoping I just asked the wrong guys. 
That would be very cool for the smaller groups, esp educational groups. I used to be in love with MySQL until I got into the private sector. These days everybody has Oracle or SQL Server.
James:
Having gotten into, and been very impressed by, PostgreSQL/PostGIS during the last year, I nonetheless think that increased spatial support in MySQL will be a serious boon to web mapping in general. If the last year has shown nothing else, it’s that there is a huge community of non-GIS developers who love developing map-based apps and have marginal knowledge of, and little interest in, the incumbent heavyweights of our industry. And a good portion of these folks are already deep into MySQL. Sure, a non-GISer ain’t going to be doing watershed analysis anytime soon–but the market for basic buffers and intersections for standard business data (zips, counties, MSAs, states, etc.) is huge.
Anyway, the relationships ESRI has with Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, et al go back awhile and it’s hard to see the business case for creating a pricey SDE bridge for an open-source database and running the risk of alienating your old allies who, at the end of the day, still have a huge % of the Fortune 500/Federal Govt/State Govt markets.
Speaking of Microsoft, the other day I saw an article about their Vista woes and one of the nuggets was that their longtime monopoly of the desktop OS has chained them to the past since their forever dogged by backwards-compatibility issues. Hmm, an entrenched monopoly limits the monopolist’s ability to innovate??
Brian, as a long time SDE dev I can say that the community would love to have a MySQL or PostgreSQL solution. Frankly I’m surprised it hasn’t happened so far. Yes Oracle is important with the government contracts, but Oracle and ESRI have had quite the falling out lately. With Oracle getting into the mapping business, why can’t ESRI just rebrand PostgreSQL and sell it with SDE as the default?
Seems smart to me.
Of course anyone who has ever dealt with ESRI and Oracle knows that there is no love loss there (I had to laugh when you called them allies). I suspected that with the growth of MySQL and PostgreSQL in countries other than the USA, we’ll see an ArcSDE for either very soon.
ESRI does have an extension called the ArcGIS Data Interoperability extension which does enable ArcGIS to directly access PostGIS and MySQL (both attributes and spatial). While this doesn’t have all the capabilities of an ArcSDE interface you are able to view, access, use this data within models and write/upate data to these. You can’t directly edit the data using ArcMap but other than that you can use
hmmm. I wonder why ESRI would bother supporting SDE on PostgreSQL when it already has a very robust PostGIS extension that does the same thing? Furthermore, anyone using this database is probably not going to be purchasing a COTS app like SDE. Same with MySQL.
1. PostGIS is not compatible with our existing applications that use SDE.
2. PostGIS does not do the “same thing” as ArcSDE.
3. Using PostgreSQL or MySQL and a COTS is not mutually exclusive at least in our experience.
4. We’d like to deploy ArcSDE more and we could if the cost of an enterprise database such as Oracle or SQL Server wasn’t so high.