[Gdal-dev] ArcSDE Support in GDAL/OGR

[Frank Warmerdam]

Duarte Carreira wrote:
> Frank,
> 
> I have briefly tested GDAL to export ArcSDE rasters. It is fast, but the
> exported image was always shifted. I couldn't see any reason and for
> lack of time I postponed further tests until de next version arrives
> with the plug-in included. For now we are using a 2 step approach, which
> is not very time effective: 1-export to tiff using ArcSDE command-line;
> 2-convert to other formats using GDAL when required. This doubles our
> export times.

Duarte,

I believe Howard is going to look into this.  Hopefully you two can work
together to isolate the issue.

> I have been testing ArcSDE vector access with several GIS tools, and
> didn't find any that would work well enough. Most don't read ArcSDE
> vectors; a few Java based do: uDIG and Jump. uDIG has a better feature
> set but is too slow with ArcSDE. Jump is faster but does not have enough
> functionality for our use. QGIS is getting very attractive but I
> couldn't figure a way to connect to ArcSDE. 

If there are windows QGIS binaries built with GDAL/OGR 1.4.x using /MD
and VisualStudio 2003 it should be possible to use the sde plugin
Howard put at:

   http://download.osgeo.org/gdal/win32/gdalwin32sde141.zip

I'm not aware of any pre-built binaries for linux.

 > Our favorite FOSS4G desktop
> today is Kosmo that reads Oracle Spatial. So we are studying the option
> of storing our vector database in sdo_geom format, which ArcSDE can be
> configured to write instead of writing the usual SDE blobs. But this has
> been a slow process, there are always lots of catches we keep finding
> when going down this interoperability road.

Yes, I sympathize.

> In a perfect world, we would be able to have a few core GIS techs
> working with top gun GIS tools, managing the database and publishing
> pre-configured layers to other GIS users that could use less expensive
> tools - where FOSS4G tools would fit nicely. In a more distant future,
> as FOSS4G evolves, who knows where this scenario may end up...

Yes, this is a reasonable path for rolling things out.

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