[postgis-users] Re: PostGIS and ESRI

[Angus Carr]

I'll spend a few hours next week looking at things with that in mind. Since 
I'm in there anyway.... 

My favourite part of what I'm doing right now is the use of a zillion little 
MDB files, all with one table of typically a hundred or two gps points. And I 
get to write the "sensible way to get our data together". Yeesh.

So, why don't we do a basic investigation, without putting a line of code in, 
as a feasibility thing. I would like to know what nasty bugaboos there are 
there.

Angus.

On Wednesday 03 April 2002 08:26 pm, you wrote:
> 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.