ArcSDE

ArcSDE
Original author(s)	Geographic Technologies Incorporated (GTI)
Developer(s)	ESRI
Initial release	1995
Stable release	9.3 / 2008-06-10; 12 months ago
Operating system	MS Windows; AIX, HP-UX, GNU/Linux, Solaris
Type	Geographic information system
License	Proprietary
Website	http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/arcsde/

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ArcSDE (Spatial Database Engine) is server software by ESRI that spatially enables a Relational Database Management System. The spatial data may then be used as part of a geodatabase.

[edit] History

The database software, named Spatial DataBase Engine (SDBE), was first designed by Geographic Technologies Incorporated (GTI) in Australia. Development shifted to Salamanca Software Pty Ltd., which developed the first production version. The president of ESRI, Jack Dangermond, announced SDE at the GIS'95 conference in Vancouver, British Columbia,^[1] and Salamanca Software was purchased by ESRI in 1996.^[2] The software was rebranded as ArcSDE to follow the naming convention of other products from ESRI.

[edit] Current generation

The latest version, ArcSDE 9.3, is sold as a component of ArcGIS Server. It is part of the ArcGIS family of software products, that integrates geographic information query, mapping, spatial analysis, and editing within a multi-user enterprise DBMS environment. ArcSDE enables organisations to move from a traditional approach — managing a separate collection of geographic data files — to an integrated environment in which spatial data is managed as a continuous database that is accessible to the entire organisation and easily published on the Web.

ArcSDE is an application server that facilitates storing and managing spatial data (raster, vector, and survey) in a DBMS and makes the data available to many applications. ArcSDE allows you to manage spatial data in one of four commercial databases (IBM DB2, Informix, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle). With the 9.3 release, support was added for the open source PostgreSQL database. ArcSDE serves data to the ArcGIS Desktop products (ArcView, ArcEditor and ArcInfo), the ArcGIS development products (ArcGIS Engine and ArcGIS Server), ArcView 3.x and ArcIMS. It is a key component in managing a multi-user GIS.

ArcSDE grew to meet the need of users of geographic data for robust multi-user editing, storage and access of extremely large geospatial databases. ArcSDE supports the ESRI geodatabase implementation.

While the traditional RDBMS software is used to keep track of the tables and records contained in the database, ArcSDE pushes the relational model higher so that geographic data - which comprises several tables - can be managed by client software seamlessly. The user is not aware of, nor do they have to deal with, the particulars of the RDBMS. Connections to the database are all routed through the ArcSDE middleware, which performs the storing, and retrieval of data.