PostGIS

Given: I have to be able to manage data in a SQL database server. I can't hack geoprocessing on the desktop any more. The datasets are too large.

Enterprise geodatabase server

The hardware

2 dual core Xeon processors,

12 GB of RAM

RAID stripe (for performance) with 3 drives

The software

All installed from packages unless noted otherwise

Debian (32 bit but should be upgraded to 64 bit soon)

PostgreSQL

PROJ 4.4.9

gdal 1.3.1 (bound to pgsql and python)

postgis

python

To facilitate viewing the data

Apache

Mapserver

php mapscript

python mapscript

Loading data into PostGIS

The word is that I can use ArcGIS to do this??? Is this true? I don't want to get anywhere near SDE if I don't have to, so putting it on top of PostgreSQL is not what I want.

What about loading ArcGIS data using fwtools?