At the ESRI Developer Summit there was news of the File Geodatabase (FGDB) API. Based on the tweets from the summit it appears: The API will be C++ only API works on Windows and Unix/Linux (specifically RedHat, Solaris, SuSE) operating systems Rudimentary support only—features such as annotation, relationships, topologies, etc. are lacking Since ESRI...
ESRI
The Shapefile – Reports of My Deprecation have been Greatly Exaggerated
The death of the shapefile has again been predicted—this time for 2010. The technical description of the format has been around for going on 12 years. In that time it has become a sort of lowest common denominator for data exchange. They’re everywhere. Making them go away is going to require a revolution of...
Rasters in the Database—Why Bother?
I’ve come to the conclusion that storing rasters in a database is of dubious value, particularly from a data warehouse perspective. If you manage a collection of rasters that are updated on a frequent basis, storing them in a relational database with ArcSDE quickly becomes a pain. I’m not talking about a dozen or...
ArcGIS Image Server
I was interested to read that ArcGIS Image Server is now available. Now I admit that I haven’t had any advanced information about the product (has anybody?) but was disappointed to find that its only supported on Windows servers. Disappointed but not surprised. I was hoping for a more open API (specifically something other...