Abstract

Leveraging RDBMS Spatial SQL in a Local Government Enterprise GIS
Track: Database Design, Automation, and Management
Authors: Issac Standard, Steve Williams

In the early 90's, GIS was born in the Planning Department of Fulton County (1,000,000+ population) where limitations in funding and immature commercial technology led Fulton to build its enterprise GIS using ESRI desktop tools coupled with a strong reliance on the spatial SQL capabilities of the PostgreSQL RDBMS, home-grown scripts, and open source web mapping platforms. In 2009, GIS moved to the Department of Information Technology where executive leadership provided resources to standardize the GIS on Microsoft and ArcGIS Server technology. The project is moving forward with great success and has offered insight on building a GIS that utilizes the robust capabilities of ArcGIS Server along with the powerful spatial SQL capability of SQL Server 2008. ArcGIS Server and RDBMS spatial SQL provide a winning combination for meeting many growing business needs such as geospatial auditing of non-GIS information systems, data transformation, workflow automation, and application development.