Thanks Vince.
We'll stick with ST_GEOMETRY as that's what we're doing now.
My first task is to prototype and do a feasibility study. Our Oracle environment is mature with many Enterprise applications hitting it. In some cases, the interaction of spatial data with SDE is back and forth, where SDE uses the tabular application data as attributes, or the application uses spatial data and maps. It's a huge migration that we'll try to break down into smaller pieces and come up with a plan.
A little daunting, but it will be fun.
In our Oracle environment we use partitioning and I non-active Data Guard for disaster recovery.
I'm finding different flavors of PostgreSQL, so I'll need to research what functionality is available where. Do you know if I start with PostgreSQL Red Hat binaries, and we later decide that we need EnterpriseDB, is that a migration, or something less painful.
Do you have a feel for the ESRI user base for PostgreSQL. We looked at it years ago, and at that time there were two users. I see more questions about it and feel it's becoming more popular and accepted.
In the end, I believe this will be a management decision on cost versus risk. Our Oracle environment is solid, it provides good performance with much functionality, we have Oracle support. I know that I can make Postgres work, there will be a migration period, and there may be issues because we are not as skilled (yet). Much of our experience will move over and be useful, but there is a learning curve to get through.
Sherrie