[GRASSLIST:9254] Re: GRASS and ArcSDE

[David Finlayson]

On 11/29/05, M S <mseibel at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm a little confused.  ArcSDE is middleware between some given application
> interacting with the user and the data, usually a database, is it not?
>

Is there any client other than ArcGIS that can interact directly with
SDE? On either end? If not, SDE is only middleware in the ESRI stack
and useless for alternative software products.

It sounds like there may be a geodatabase reader in gdal soon, that's
good news. But, what about rasters? To be fare, this is really a
killer feature of SDE. It can hold terabytes of raster data seamlessly
and efficiently. I was really impressed when I saw how fast it works
on a remote ArcGIS client.  Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be
any way to take advantage of this infrastructure from GRASS.

This doesn't bode well when the University's major data archives start
migrating to SDE.

>  its sad... GIS==ERSI not only in your institution, but in the community in
> general, specifically in the USA.  much like PC==MICROSOFT.
>

Indeed.