Setup: Oracle 11g looking at an Oracle appliance for 12C. We have 3 tiers, a development, Eval(QA/QC), and a production. Only 1 person editing. We have heard SDE is going away but no details. While there are a couple polygon featureclasses in SDE, most of the data we edit and use is point based.
We have scripts that run to export data as shapefiles using SDE and ArcPy and some that hit Oracle without using a SDE connection. I have web services and apps that used SDE data to move points and some that don't need SDE at all. So I'm tossed as to the future choice.
While in ArcMap, I can move the points, I can also bring them in as a X,Y event and keep my editing through the web interface with a generic REST service. The polygon Featureclasses could be put into a File GDB because they are not edited, and we could even use them for ArcServer. Basically State, County, and Local boundaries, not much data. The polyline and other stuff comes across as a service from other state agencies who maintain their own data.
My question is what is the future of SDE, our rep said development is minimal, so in the future what can we expect? In our case the overhead of 3 tiers of Oracle with SDE for only one person editing may be overkill.. Is Esri planning on supporting Oracle spatial, in ArcPro and will the functionality be similar to ArcSDE? At this stage we are planning on upgrading our databases but not sure if we should keep SDE. I have not be able to find a life cycle document on this. Your thoughts?