request for comments - SDE

[Stephen Lime]

Greetings all: I'm screwing around with new code to
allow broader support for queries etc. At the heart of 
this discussion is whether consider SDE as simply a
data source or data processor. As it sits the current 
code utilizes much of the SDE processing engine (eg. 
SDE based clipping, RDBMS expressions). This leads to 
very non-general code and potentially confusing
configuration. SDE is sort of special in this case. I'm
leaning to using SDE simply as another datasource,
relying on mapserver functions to project, clip, classify and query. I believe consistency is important
and I really don't want to change the rules for
different data sources.

Understanding that MapServer expressions are ripe for
optimization and expansion (eg. functions), how many
users would this decision impact? Given that a full 
SDE implementation hasn't been out there anyway I would
hope not many.

Have a good new year...

Steve