RFC 38: Include MS SQL Server 2008 Native Driver in 5.2

[Howard Butler]

On Nov 14, 2007, at 12:47 PM, Steve Lime wrote:

> Thanks Howard, I think this is the first concrete example of a  
> plugin layer definition I've seen. As an aside
> does this driver support the sub-select functionality like PostGIS  
> and Oracle Spatial?

I believe the driver is in the style of PostGIS or Oracle Spatial in  
that you can do sub-selects and operations.  SQL Server 2008 is pretty  
new, so I don't know how functional this stuff is from a practical  
standpoint yet.

With respect to plugins, Jeff and I now use PLUGIN as the default  
connection type for MS4W when people want to use ArcSDE (and I added  
support so that we can build the OCI driver as a plugin as well).  The  
only downside of this approach is that windows swallows error messages  
about not finding dlls when you are running under a webserver.   
(shp2img usually will show you via the console what dll it thinks it  
can't find, however).

If it were practical, and we could tighten up the user experience some  
more, I'd support dynamically loading *all* of our native drivers as  
plugins by default.  From a development standpoint right now, it is a  
really nice approach.

Howard