Key Features

ArcSDE plays an important role in a multiuser GIS by providing a number of fundamental capabilities.

• High-performance RDBMS gateway-ArcSDE is a gateway to many RDBMSs. It is not a relational database or a storage model. Instead, it is an interface that supports advanced, high-performance GIS data management in a number of RDBMS platforms.Learn more
  
  
• Open RDBMS support-ArcSDE allows you to manage geographic information consistently in a number of RDBMSs: IBM DB2, Informix, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle.
  
  
• Multiuser-ArcSDE enables multiuser read and write access to geodatabases.
  
  
• Continuous, scalable databases-ArcSDE can support massively large geodatabases and any number of users, up to the RDBMS limits.
  
  
• GIS work flows and long transactions-Data management work flows in GIS, such as multiuser editing, history, checkout/check-in, and loosely coupled replication, rely on long transactions and versioning. ArcSDE provides this support across RDBMSs.
  
  
• Comprehensive geographic information modeling-ArcSDE ensures high-integrity data storage of feature and raster geometries in RDBMSs, including well-formed feature and raster geometries, support for x,y,z and x,y,z,m coordinates, curves, solids, multirow rasters, topologies, networks, annotation, metadata, geoprocessing models, maps, layers, and more.
  
  
• Spatial data integrity-ArcSDE ensures the integrity of spatial data storage in any RDBMS. It ensures well-formed geometric integrity of all spatial data. When coupled with the geodatabase application logic, advanced GIS behavior and business rules are enabled on massively large data collections that can be accessed and maintained by any number of users.
  
  
• Flexible configuration-The ArcSDE gateway logic supports several multitier configuration options for application servers within client applications and across networks and computers. ArcSDE is supported for a broad range of Windows, UNIX, and Linux operating systems.
  
  
• Spatial geometry storage-ArcSDE allows you to manage and use RDBMS-based data with GIS applications. It accesses data stored in a RDBMS and takes full advantage of generic RDBMS capabilities and SQL data types. It leverages generic RDBMS capabilities in order to support GIS user requirements.Learn more
  
  
• ArcSDE for Coverages-While ArcSDE is best known for providing access to data in commercial relational database management systems (RDBMSs), it is also able to serve file-based spatial data sets. This read-only server, called ArcSDE for Coverages, serves a number of file-based vector data sets.Learn more