[postgis-users] Re: PostGIS and ESRI

[Paul Ramsey]

Angus Carr wrote:

> In the interests of full disclosure, I work for a consulting company that is
> an ESRI Business Partner. 

That's OK, so do we. :) I have seen the enemy, and he is myself. :)

I am very interested in pursuing this. I too read over the ArcGIS object
model and thought: hmmm, theoretically, this is just another provider.
They designed the thing with a billion abstractions, so why not? 

On the flip side, there is *bound* to be something nasty in there! They
are not afraid of us, they are afraid of Oracle and IBM and the
commercial spatial DB providers submarining SDE by producing useful,
beautiful backend spatial data-stores, and I would think they would
guard against Oracle or IBM being able to include a simple 'DB2
extension for ArcGIS' or 'OracleSpatial extension for ArcGIS' in their
systems.

So on the one hand, everything I have seen technically says it should be
possible, but my read of ESRI's motives and requirements says they
cannot possibly have left that gate open.

-- 
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     | Paul Ramsey
     | Refractions Research
     | Email: pramsey at refractions.net
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