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Spatial Database for Postgres and ArcGis users: how to choose

Filed on June 6th, 2008 at 5:45 pm under , , , , , , , , , , , | 13 Comments 

As many of you can have already read, ArcSde for Postgres is coming out at ArcGis 9.3 (it is currently in the release candidate state). It will let you store geometries in two formats, Esri geometry and PostGis geometry, in the same fashion ArcSde for Oracle is letting Esri or Oracle geometries be stored.
I have seen some interest in the GIS community about this new, and i was reading interesting posts by Bill Dollins, Paul Ramsey, James Fee and Dave Bouwman, so I thought i would post here my opinion. Plus, as some of you may already know, zigGis 2.0 is out, so I am very interested in understanding where it would be better to use one (ArcSde) or the other (zigGis 2.0) solution.

First let me introduce you my point of view: i am since the ARC/INFO era a great fan of Esri software, and I am one of the many users in the GIS community saying that Esri is much much better vs Open Source in the GIS desktop products sector.
In fact, while also in the GIS OS scenario there are good products like QGIS, uDig, gvSIG (and some other), in my opinion no one of them still can even fairly reach what ArcGis Desktop and its extensions can actually do (with the big limit that you can use it only in a Microsoft box, but that is another story).
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