[Gdal-dev] ArcSDE Support in GDAL/OGR

[Frank Warmerdam]

Duarte Carreira wrote:
> Why am I interested in having GDAL/OGR reading ArcSDE?
>  - ArcGIS is slow exporting raster mosaics - we use ArcSDE command-line
> utilities which are veeery fast;
>  - ArcSDE command-line tools only export to TIF format;
>  - I would prefer having GDAL exporting to a plethora of formats and
> letting the user choose one;
>  - I would prefer to use GDAL instead of ArcSDE command-line tools
> because I feel I shouldn't have to install ArcSDE binaries on users'
> PCs;

Duarte,

The good news is that the current read-only ArcSDE driver in GDAL should
be sufficient for these "extract to another format" uses.

>  - OGR read access to ArcSDE is important to me IF there are GIS desktop
> tools that use it to access the data (I'm thinking QGIS or others...),
> and IF mapservers use it (mapserver, geoserver, ...);

MapServer, and GeoServer (via GeoTools) have non-OGR mechanisms to
access ArcSDE vector data so OGR support isn't strictly needed.  It
should be possible to view SDE sourced data in QGIS using the OGR driver.

SDE vector data can also be used (read only) in GRASS, OpenEV,
and other OGR desktop software though currently it is often hard
to get the driver built in.  Hopefully the standard win32 builds
with SDE as a plugin will help this to some degree.

By the way, it's nice to hear a strong success story with ArcSDE
raster from the horses mouth.  While I still think files in the file
system can be somewhat faster than doing the same thing in a database
through some middleware, I can definitely see huge data management
benefits to having the raster data taken care of in the database with
the assistance of middleware.

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
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