[postgis-users] PostgreSQL/PostGIS and ArcGIS Server 9.3

[Tim Bowden]

On Fri, 2008-05-23 at 11:13 -0700, Paul Ramsey wrote:
> On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 11:05 AM, Tim Bowden <tim.bowden at westnet.com.au> wrote:
> 
> >> In general, if you restrict yourself ot reading with 3rd party tools
> >> and writing with ESRI tools, or non-ESRI tools working through the SDE
> >> API, you should be safe.
> >>
> >
> > So how much of the API is published?  My (very limited) understanding is
> > that it's not quite simple, but how complex can it really be to
> > implement an abstraction layer that allows open source clients to act
> > like ArcGIS clients (full read/write)?
> 
> The SDE client API all published, and Geotools in particular has
> worked on having a pretty complete support for it. Recent work has
> even been looking at supported versioned edits to SDE in Geotools.
> Unversioned edits have been supported for some time.  The only hidden,
> non-technical, downside is that the SDE license manager only allows 5
> non-ESRI clients to connect by default, so you have to be judicious in
> what you connect to the server.
> 
> P

Well that maybe opens up the possibilities.  Call me a dreamer if you
want but what if you could do multi-master between a PostgreSQL/PostGIS
and SDE (on anything) using two stage commit with geotools as the basis
of a piece of middleware managing the connections.  Put
update/insert/delete triggers in both SDE/whatever and
PostgreSQL/PostGIS that call the "multi-master" middleware and all of a
sudden (well, after appropriate non trivial dev work) you've broken the
strangle hold of the SDE engine on your enterprise.  There would be
issues mapping data types (spatial and non-spatial) with different
definitions between the systems which would need to be managed.  I
imagine you can shoot this idea down fairly easily, but at least you'll
increase my understanding in doing so :-)

Regards,
Tim