Well I haven’t blogged anything for ages, as I’ve been a little busy finishing up my current project, and pretty much onsite most of July, but hopefully things will calm down a bit now. I’ve just been trawling through the UC Q&A pages seeing what all the lucky people who are off to the user conference will get to see. (Not that I’m jealous or anything!). Everyone seems to be focusing on the new licensing/tiering of ArcGIS Server. I think the change is a good thing, though it will take a while to get used to thinking about 1 product “ArcGIS Server” with multiple levels rather than all the different individual products (ArcSDE, ArcGIS, ArcIMS etc) as we do at the moment. Some people have complained that its now even more complex, but i think once you get used to it its actually simpler, and its going to be a lot easier and more consistent when trying to explain to potential customers.
Anyway to the point: I discovered this little gem in the Q and A section that seems to have been overlooked in all the Server discussion. It seems that ESRI will be supporting an open source DBMS in the form of PostGreSQL, this support is currently in testing and due for release sometime after the initial 9.2 release. You can read about it at the Q&A section under the Geodatabase and ArcSDE section (Q11).
I’d heard rumours of this, and noticed a few bugs logged in the 9.2 system that mentioned Postgres, which pointed to something happening, but its nice to see something public about this, It will be interesting to see whether people actually choose this platform to run an enterprise Spatial database with ESRI technology, or whether organisations that adopt an open source database will be less inclined to use it with commercial software.
August 3, 2006 at 6:05 pm
We would be all over it. I have always thought this was a good idea. 4 yrs ago at the UC I told Robert that they should think about doing this. C’mon – free RDBMS gives me more money to spend on ESRI software. I love PostgreSQL and used it for most of my projects before I went to ESRI. I know some people like MySQL, and it wasn’t bad with the innodb engine, but I just had a soft spot for PostgeSQL.
I hope they do this as an interim release before 9.3.
August 7, 2006 at 1:30 pm
Thats interesting to hear, I’m only aware of a couple of our customers who use open source DBMS’s for the majority of there business, and at the moment they have a seperate Oracle database for spatial stuff, I’m sure they too would welcome an OS alternative, I can see this being especially attractive on the linux platform. Less money for oracle more for ESRI? Sounds good to me.
November 29, 2007 at 5:39 pm
Looks like this is what was said:
Q: What are the plans for supporting the PostgreSQL database with ArcGIS Server (ArcSDE technology) and when will this functionality be available?
ArcGIS Server (ArcSDE technology) will support the PostgreSQL database at the ArcGIS 9.3 release. This will further enhance ESRI’s commitment to make its technology compatible and integrated with Open Source software technologies. The enterprise geodatabase and all of its standard capabilities will be fully supported. It will be OGC/ISO compliant and the PostGIS geometry type will be supported. In addition, ESRI will also provide its own spatial type for storing geometries in PostgreSQL.
January 12, 2008 at 9:28 am
Hai, immediately i want do the accadamic project