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

[Bruce Bannerman]

Hi Andrew,

I admired the work that your former team was doing. It was a pity that sufficient time and resourcing was not allocated to see this potential work through to fruition.

People often under-estimate how much effort is required to sponsor an open source project, and allow sufficient time for a self-sustaining community to evolve.

In our case, we will not be able to add another database platform to our suite. We're actually reducing and trying to consolidate our technology base.

Therefore we would not be able to look at Ingres as a platform, even though it has the same roots as Postgres.

Bruce

________________________________________
From: discuss-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [discuss-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Ross [andrew.ross at eclipse.org]
Sent: Saturday, 12 July 2014 2:11 AM
To: discuss at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Using ArcGIS Desktop with PostGIS  [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

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