Chris - Recently I too talked at length with ESRI on the SDE-ArcView versus Oracle8i Spatial Cartridge-ArcView connection. Not a clear connection. While it is possible to purchase Oracle 8i Personal for $395 and also purchase the 8i Spatial Cartridge for $360 for "a" workstation, neither SDE nor ArcView can make an effective link to the Spatial Cartridge. You'll need to buy their SDE and add 8i. There seems to be plenty of confusion at Oracle on the need for "Enterprise" versus "Personal" (The confusion may be simple FUD due to the cost difference - just buy Enterprise at $11,000 and you have an answer - what confusion a commission brings!) The essential difference of Enterprise over Personal are the availability of, I believe JAVA components to enable Internet WEBization. As long as the product accessing 8i is not exposed to Internet or Intranet users, the Personal version is OK to use and develop on. They also have a licensing policy for LAN seats too. In any case you can get a CDROM 8i demo which includes the data cartridges for like $5 or for free if you have time to download the 100MBs in the kit. The 8i Spatial Cartridge seems to be tuned to MapInfo's tools, both the desktop stuff like Pro and MapX and more so for their WEB tool MapExtream/JAVA. If you add MapInfo's Spatialware you extend the basic spatial operations of the Cartridge with an apparently very powerful "middleware" equal to SDE or better. The Boulder-based ESRI engineer I talked to thought ESRI would be able to directly use the Oracle spatial-object indices in "about a year and some". In the interval you'll need to rely on ESRI's SDE external indices and spatial objects model. Spatial Cartridge on 8i versus SDE is the technical way to go - it just works better and my bet way faster. MM 10/13/99 Chris woods wrote: > Greetings, > > My company is about to purchase SDE and Oracle for use with Arcview. Oracle is > telling us that we need to purchase the Enterprise edition of Oracle and their > spatial cartridge to make it work with SDE. I was looking at the esri site and > found out that the spatial cartridge isn't needed. Do we still need to shell > out the big bucks for the Enterprise Oracle or can we make Sde work with the > standard Oracle? > > Thanks in Advance, > Will Sum > > Christopher Woods > > GIS Programmer > SAIC > Newport, RI > (401) 847-4210 > [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, send e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and put "unsubscribe MAPINFO-L" in the message body, or contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
