Better PostGIS-Support for ArcGIS

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06-26-2016 11:18 PM
Status: Open
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KlemensKauppert
New Contributor II

PostgreSQL/PostGIS is a widely supported opensource RDBMS which is in use in several larger organisations and growing. Functionality, usage and development under PostgreSQL are much cheaper than under Oracle spatial i.e. in my experience. It is often the base of a large geospatial infrastructure. In this position it is a usefull gdi-tool and gets more and more in the focus of smaller and medium organisations and companies, but the support in ArcGIS is very low. Sure, you can inslall the client lib to get read access to a mostly older version of a postgres-server, but if you need a real productive access you have to spend a lot of money for extensions or server installations. For a smaller company this is mostly too expensive and there is not the experience, knowhow and time available to manage a gdi with wfs and wms.

For me, it is not comprehensible why there is at least no support for the most actual postgres-version or a simple read-write access. Every competitor provides this support, i.e. autodesk for free, which is a great opportunity to connect CAD to GIS. Also, the postgres-api does not change this often to limit the acces to a specific version. No client does care about the server version, it just works. So this should not be a great deal to do.

You did this already some time ago with spatialite, which is great for desktop use and data exchange but does not solve larger problems.

4 Comments
MatsElfström

Yes, I totally second this motion. On a quest to find a common database platform for a number of spatial geodata tools, PostGreSQL/PostGIS comes out on top. With one notable exception, the ESRI biosphere. Support sucks, and as Klemens points out, is always one PostGreSQL generation behind.

BryanHall

Yes - Support for Postgres 10.3 / PostGIS 2.4.x please!

It's frustrating to have to use OLD versions of Postgres with ESRI software when you only want to use the native spatial type (not the ESRI st_geometry) to enable a geodatabase. If I'm not going to use that type - why do I even need those libraries (this really gets to be an issue with cloud-hosted databases)?

I really want to use the enhanced parallel features in the newer versions along with the better optimizer costing model in the 10 series. I installed both 10.6 and Pro, and guess what - no support for anything beyond PG 9.6!

MikeDolbow

Agreed. It seems things are improving - you can now use the native PostGIS geometry. But if you want to both read AND edit in Esri tools (like Pro), you need to do the "Create Enterprise Geodoatabase" routine, which requires an enterprise/server license. Anything less than that, and you can *read* from Pro (via query layer) - but you can't edit. I've found that you can use pro (or ArcPy) to *load* data in, table-by-table, which in some cases is useful. But obviously once you've got your main data loaded in, you just want to edit it there. And the current capabilities prohibit that.

MikeDolbow

I just created this idea over in the Pro section if folks want to upvote it over there. A "newer" idea might get some traction...who knows?