One of the more interesting features ESRI has rolled out lately is the ability to connect to geodatabases that aren’t the same release. Now ArcGIS 9.2 SP5 or SP6 clients can make connections to ArcSDE 9.3 geodatabases and for ArcGIS 9.3 clients can make direct connections to any ArcSDE 9.x geodatabase.
Direct connections to ArcSDE geodatabases
The ESRI Inside the Geodatabase blog has some links to web help and support information worth checking out.
ESRI clients can now consume multiple versions of the geodatabase
2 responses so far ↓
1
Joseph
// Jul 10, 2008 at 10:47 am
Wonderful image to go with this tagline.
Is that one of the lesser known Baldwin brothers?
One of the first canned data sets I ever worked with was an ESRI course curriculum where the feature set contained all the donut shop locations in the greater Redlands area.
Now I can access that feature set in any flavor of ArcSDE 9 geodatabase.
Mmm, jelly filled attributes.
2
MTBMaven
// Jul 16, 2008 at 9:04 am
This is huge for our organization. I am very pleased to see this announcement. For the past few years the ESRI Systems Implementation Team has been encouraging the use of 2-tier Direct Connect over the more traditional 3-tier connections. If memory serves me correctly, ESRI reports a 30% reduction in processing on the database server with the SDE services turned off.
We are using Oracle 10g with Data Guard Fast Start Fail Over to facilitate automatic database failover with our geographically diverse geodatabase. The use of Direct Connect is required for seamless transition between the primary and failover databases.
As we implement this system we have noticed a few issues we are still grappling with:
1) With the SDE services off you cannot easily issue SDE commands to the data. Existing batch jobs or tasks requiring SDE command line operations have to be re-engineered.
2) Insuring version and patch consistency between client, application server, and database server within our organization (with decentralized IT services) was going to be a nightmare. We recently decided just to leave the SDE service running, accept the 30% overhead, and loose failover capability for all users without a high availability business requirement. But now we don’t have to, happy days are here again!!!
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