Paul Ramsey on PostGIS for SDE
Paul has been thinking about the announcement that ESRI would allow ArcSDE to use PostgreSQL and has up with a pretty good argument on why ESRI should make PostGIS the default spatial type.
One of the interesting nuggets to come out of the ESRI User Conference this year was the news that ESRI was going to support ArcSDE on PostgreSQL “sometime soon”. Which, to PostGIS people like ourselves suggests the question: “implemented how?”
If it was up to me, I’d tell ESRI to fly Paul out to Redlands and get ArcSDE running on PostgreSQL immediately. I’ve got a dying Oracle 8i installation that would love to be running PostgreSQL.
James:
Good idea, because the gathering storm is coming from Redmond–not from Mountain View or even Redwood City.
Consider what’s going to happen when SQL Server finally supports geometry natively: MS has the back-end, MS has the front-end (Virtual Earth), if they implement spatial functions (buffer, intersection, distance, convex hull, etc, etc) they’ll have enough GIS for many organizations, they have a huge MS Office crowd they can tie in with a lightweight implementation, and the .NET developer community ready to code. Oh, and they already do routing and output to mobile devices.
That is a very potent atomic elbow drop coming off the top rope.
Meanwhile, license dollars are at a premium: if a crucial part of the stack includes your customer cutting a check to a third party, wouldn’t it be great to get the customer to spend those dollars on ArcServer instead.
From a PR point of view it seems to be a slam dunk: dust off the ESRI “GIS for Everyone” mousepads!
BT
Sweet! Brian, I hope you won’t mind if I try out the WWF metaphor in a future post.
Yes, Microsoft is attacking the market segment that ESRI says AGX is positioned at. They are just doing it ubiquitously instead of having a central client. In some ways MS gets GIS better than ESRI. It should be a pervasive technology, not a stodgy dedicated app.
Sean:
It’s a disgrace that the World Wildlife Fund successfully sued Vince McMahon for exclusive use of the WWF acronym.
Long Live Bruno Sammartino,
BT