SDE sites

[Howard Butler]

Kevin,

MapServer and ArcSDE/Oracle has been working quite well for me for a number 
of years.  I also have maintained the MapServer SDE driver for a couple of 
years and added a few extra features like versioned layer queries which 
ArcIMS doesn't even support.  The SDE C API abstracts away the database for 
the most part, and it doesn't matter if Oracle, MSSQL, or Informix are 
actually behind SDE.  Did you have a specific question, or were you just 
wondering whether or not it worked?

There are some features that are not there yet (and might never 
be).  Attribute joins are on the wishlist, but I've found it is much 
easier, simpler, and faster to use sdeview to create a view for something 
that I would want to join.  QueryByShape is not supported, but the 
impending implementation of WKT support in MapServer should make its 
development quite easy (SDE C API supports exporting and importing to and 
from WKT/WKB).  DirectConnect and Geodatabase functionality are not 
natively supported by the SDE C API and are not supported by 
MapServer.  There is also experimental SDE raster support, but as far as I 
know, I'm the only one to ever get it to actually work :( (and I don't use 
it any sort of production sense... tiled overviewed tiffs on the filesystem 
are much better).

I also maintain a set of windows binaries at 
<http://hobu.stat.iastate.edu/mapserver> that you can use with the SDE 9.0 
DLLs to try MapServer SDE support.

Howard