From the ESRI Developer Summit - Tuesday March 18, 2008
The morning of the Dev Summit was spent in the Plenary Session. The Plenary acts as a presentation to look at some new product functionality and more recent projects that have been developed. This years Plenary went smoothly and the talks and demos did a great job of highlighting some key projects that the development teams at ESRI have been working on lately.
There was a good flow to the presentation as Jim McKinney used the newly launched Resource Center as a staging point to introduce each of the development teams and their respective lead developers.
Each team did a good job of not only looking at recent projects from a user perspective, but also delving into the developer perspective, showing code and programming examples of how things work behind the scenes.
Following the Plenary session the technical tracks kicked off. From the geodatabase perspective the "Effective Geodatabase Programming" session was presented by Brent Pierce and Erik Hoel, a senior developer on the geodatabase team. This session dealt with very low level programming patterns that should be followed when programming with the geodatabase API. The presentation tackled the subjects that a developer needs to be knowledgeable of to effectively use the geodatabase API.
Here are some slides highlighting the session contents as a teaser for those that might want to grab the whole presentation on EDN after the conference.
The presenters also went into great detail about the inner-workings of the Geodatabase. The next slide explaining the client server cursor buffering model is a good example of this.
To keep the session up-beat Erik injected his classic sense of humor in some slides including interesting images on slides where he was highlighting bad programming patterns with the geodatabase API (most people got the point...).
Following this session our in house database guru's Tom Brown, Kevin Watt and Brijesh Shrivastav gave their "Working with the Geodatabase Effectively Using SQL" session. This popular presentation lead to large crowds and a series of very interesting spill over discussions following the talk.
This session went into detail on working with the geodatabase at the SQL level. The presenters dealt with PostgreSQL, SQL Server 2008 and Oracle DBMS platforms. Here is a slide given by Brijesh concerning working with geometries in the spatial type for PostgreSQL fuctionality being released in ArcGIS 9.3.
Tom also went into detail about how to work with the various spatial types available on the Oracle DBMS platform. Here is a slide highlighting some new operations added at 9.3.
Tomorrow the Geodatabase Team will be giving two sessions: Implementing Enterprise Applications with the Geodatabase and the first of two offerings of the Distributed Geodatabase Development session which delves into geodatabase replication.
Also, tomorrow morning Alan Cooper is giving a keynote speaker address which should make for an interesting talk and generate some buzz and discussion.