The answer is "Neither" or "Both".
The SDO_GEOMETRY type is used by both Oracle Spatial and Esri ArcGIS, but it is provided
by Intermedia, which is part of the base Oracle install capability. I never install Spatial, and
I always have SDO_GEOMETRY available.
ArcSDE is the Esri technology which integrates Esri's client applications with major databases
to provide versioned geodatabase and ST_GEOMETRY capability. It does nothing of its own
volition, though clients like Catalog are fond of generating indexes when data tables are
created and populated through ArcObjects (after all, they can't be effectively queried without.
an index). If you don't wish a spatial index to be constructed, you may need to code your
own import tool (or to drop it before performing further processing).
There is no relationship whatsoever between the index on file geodatabases and the index
Oracle provides for SDO_GEOMETRY columns.
- V
