[OSGeo-Discuss] Using ArcGIS Desktop with PostGIS [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

[Andrew Ross]

Dear Bruce,

Not sure if this is interesting or not. In my previous role, my team & I 
worked on adding ArcGIS support for Ingres, which is also open source 
and similar to Postgres/PostGIS. I learned quite a bit during the 
process. I appreciated that Esri offers a very useful layer to plugin & 
extend ArcMap/ArcCatalog, etc. You can code in Python, .NET, or Java.

Despite being warned by many that we were crazy to even try to do this, 
after investing to grok Esri's architecture, we got it done in only a 
few months. The end result was pretty good... full read/write and most 
major features worked well. It didn't require ArcSDE.

This wasn't every single feature of course.  For example, we didn't do 
long transaction support as it wasn't that urgent for our customer at 
the time & was going to be a lot of work. From what I understand from 
the outside, the team has nudged it along over the years fixing up bugs 
and edge cases we didn't consider in the first release.

At the time, we took a brief look to understand the landscape and there 
seemed to be some fairly significant limitations in ArcGIS support for 
PostGIS. I'm not sure if that's changed since then as it has been a 
couple of years.

The team has disbanded since, but if there were interest in engaging any 
of them, I'd be happy to make introductions. I also know of companies 
that do work in this space.

Andrew

On 11/07/14 00:56, Bruce Bannerman wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Does anyone have any experience using PostGIS as a vector spatial data 
> source with ArcGIS Desktop as a client?
>
> I'm particularly interested in our ArcGIS Desktop users being able to 
> create, update and delete spatial data managed within a PostGIS 
> environment, without the use of ArcSDE or similar middle wear.
>
> Would you be interested in sharing any experiences that you've had 
> from implementation to operational use?
>
>
> We have a mixed spatial environment with both ArcGIS Desktop and open 
> source Desktop GIS applications as client tools.
>
> Provided that we can arrive at a good robust solution, I'd like to 
> move our ArcGIS Desktop clients away from ArcSDE, and consolidate our 
> vector spatial database environment on Postgres / PostGIS.
>
> Bruce
>

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