[postgis-users] Re: PostGIS and ESRI

[Tyler Mitchell]

Hi guys, particularly Frank and Paul,
Re: these messages (below) from last fall.  Could either of you, or others
comment on where things have come/gone in the meantime?  I.e. how close
(read: how much development needed) are we to having something to work with
ArcGIS in particular.  I know there's been a lot of dialogue going around
on this stuff, but I thought maybe it would be a good time especially for
new users like to me to get a bit of an update on using PostGIS with OpenEV
or and with ArcGIS (via OLE DB).
Any comments?


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[postgis] Re: PostGIS and ESRI
Paul Ramsey postgis at yahoogroups.com
Fri, 21 Sep 2001 15:36:19 -0700


"Matt.Wilkie" wrote:
>
> Do you see PostGIS ever being in a position to work with (and/or
> replace) ArcSDE and [Oracle|DB2|SQL|etc]?

Hi Matt,

PostGIS/PostgreSQL should, long term, be able to replace ArcSDE, Oracle
Spatial, and DB2 Spatial. That is the goal. That is why we are working
so hard to follow the OpenGIS "Simple Features for SQL" specification.

When you ask whether PostGIS can "work with" ArcSDE/OracleSpatial/DB2 I
assume you are actually asking whether the desktop software which
currently works with those products (mostly ArcGIS/ArcView/ArcINFO but
also GeoMedia and MapInfo and AutoCAD) will eventually be able to work
with PostGIS as a spatial backend. And in the short term the answer is
"no", because ESRI holds an effective desktop monopoly on GIS
viewers/editors which they are using to push their own client/server
protocol: the protocol used by ArcSDE.

In the longer term (12-24 months) there is a moderate probability that
the Web Feature Server standard will begin to open up the client/server
communication path, and as the commercial vendors start to implement WFS
in their software, we will already be there. Most of the hard stuff
about WFS (transactions, locking, intersections, buffers, other
topologic operations) can be done by a spatial database, if you have
one, and we do (or at least, we will). But that is a ways out.

In the short term, there is Mapserver as a PostGIS client. I imagine
sometime soon, either GRASS or OpenEV or OpenMap will end up supporting
PostGIS as a data source as well. But it'll be slow going and for now
we'll be writing our own clients. If we're lucky, forward-looking
companies like Byers will include PostGIS as a part of their own desktop
GIS software offerings. The future is hard to see, but I think we're on
the right track.

Hope that helps,
Paul

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[postgis] Re: PostGIS and ESRI
Frank Warmerdam postgis at yahoogroups.com
Fri, 21 Sep 2001 22:16:52 -0400

Guys,

I just wanted to add a few points to this.

  o OpenEV support PostGIS now via the OGR link for reading, though not yet
for
    update.  It would be sweet to add write back to OGR to OpenEV, and
perhaps
    some smarts for browsing tables, and doing spatial and attribute
queries
    from OpenEV.

  o It should be possible to serve read-only data to ArcGIS from PostGIS
via
    an OGR based OLE DB provider, though I haven't tried building the
PostGIS
    link for OGR on Windows yet, nor will this work fully till the upcoming
    ArcGIS Service Pack 2 release this fall.

I would really like to update OGR to match with all the PostGIS 0.6
services
and get a nice Linux build of OGR tools that can be used as an auxilary
set of tools for loading PostGIS, and doing operations like reprojecting
layers.