request for comments - SDE

[Stephen Lime]

There may be some specialized support for certain functions (i.e. buffer) if SDE
is available. In that case we'd replace my code with ESRI's. Otherwise I guess
you'd want to write an SDE only application. MapServer will use SDE for spatial
(eg. envelope) queries and limited attribute query.

The new code base will give a programmer a short list of functions he/she will
have to write to integrate a new data source with the MapServer. Under that
scenario it should be easy to add Oracle Spatial support. I myself am not in a
position to do that since I don't have that software. I'll gladly help the person(s)
that wish to add that support though.

Steve

Stephen Lime
Internet Applications Analyst

Minnesota DNR
500 Lafayette Road
St. Paul, MN 55155
651-297-2937

>>> Gernot Rücker <gruecker at zebris-geoconsult.de> 01/09/01 04:12AM >>>
Hello Steve, list,

I personally think that using SDE as a data processor might have some
advantages. Although I never did any programming using the SDE API myself I
think that there is a lot of functionallity in it that would be very nice to
have access to. We are thinking about using MapServer and ArcSDE to serve a
large amount of data over the net. This data should be accessed by users
using RDBMS and locational queries. Anyway, I did not yet get to play some
more withg it to get a deeper understanding on how map server and SDE work
together - so maybe I am not yet in the position to give a fully qualified
comment on this.
I would also like to know if there are any plans on providing access to the
Oracle Spatial Data Object datatype.

Gernot

----- Original Message -----
From: Stephen Lime <steve.lime at dnr.state.mn.us>
To: <mapserver-users at lists.gis.umn.edu>
Sent: Saturday, December 30, 2000 5:28 AM
Subject: request for comments - SDE


> 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
>