Inside the Geodatabase : 2008 ESRI Developer Summit

From the Dev Summit – Thursday March 20, 2008

jona4440 — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 23:00:00 GMT

A few sessions were offered by the geodatabase team on the final day of the Dev Summit. Developing with Rasters in ArcGIS and Distributed Geodatabase Development were given in the morning, and the second offering of Effective Geodatabase Programming was given in the afternoon.

The raster session, given by Hong Xu, Joe Roubal, and Peng Gao, discussed typical developing programming patterns for creating raster centric applications. The main topics were: how to create and visualize your raster data, how to create custom geodata transformations, creating custom pixel filters, and how to use the new APIs in 9.3 to work with image services and WCS services.

Here are some sample slides from the presentation: the following slide shows how developers can create custom geodata transformations based on their own image formats and plug these into ArcGIS. This way their proprietary images can be used by ArcGIS.

The talk also looked into how developers can access image services (shown below) and WCS services to get a raster from the layer and use it for spatial analysis operations.

In the distributed data session Gary MacDougal and Khaled Hassen started with an overview of distributing data techniques before presenting the key elements of geodatabase replication and the replication API.

The following slide shows some common use cases for distributing geodatabases which can be accommodated through geodatabase replication.

As a sample of some of the code shown during the session, this next slide describes how a developer can extend replica creation through custom behavior.

After the morning presentations, Jim McKinney MCed the Closing Session while everyone was finishing a sit down lunch in the Oasis room. He went over some feedback from attendees of the conference, basically describing what people thought we did well and some things that could be done better. In raise-your-hand survey fashion Jim gathered some feedback in the room about conference specifics such as: The length of the conference, the time and length of sessions, session topics, should we offer “twilight sessions” (a handful of hardcore developers who crave night-time sessions raised their hands for this), should we have sessions based on a user track, etc…

The overall consensus was that we struck a sweet spot this year as far as the length of the conference, staffing, and session content. This was our biggest and probably our best Developer Summit so far.

From our teams perspective, we gathered a lot of useful information and feedback from users and felt as though we were able to help a lot of developers find answers to the questions that they had. Our Meet the Development Team session on Wednesday was a good indication of the value of personal interaction with the developer community.

Thanks to everyone that attended and to everyone that came to the Geodatabase Island to talk with the development team. We hope the Developer Summit was an interesting and beneficial experience for you - It certainly was for us.

From the Dev Summit – Wednesday March 19, 2008

jona4440 — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 01:07:00 GMT

Wednesday morning started with a talk from Alan Cooper, this years keynote speaker. The “Father of Visual Basic” delivered an insightful presentation titled Post Industrial Management. The talk compared past management strategies of the atom based industrial age to management strategies of today’s knowledge based era. He delved into a structured approach to managing developers by segregating them into three focused job descriptors which he labeled Interaction Designer, Design Engineer and Production Engineer.

During the talk Cooper threw out many shrewd nuggets of wisdom as well as humorous and accurate observations, such as “Building software is like walking through a minefield. If you don’t hit a mine it’s really quick”. His knack for pairing key concepts and ideas with aptly chosen metaphors made for a lighthearted and instructive presentation. All in all it was a very interesting talk that inspired a great deal of discussion throughout the day.

We aren’t allowed to distribute the actual presentation, but many of the concepts are covered in a similar article on Cooper’s site titled Design Engineering: The Next Step

In the afternoon, Forrest Jones and Brent Pierce gave the Implementing Enterprise Applications with the Geodatabase session.

This session was designed to take an enterprise centric view on common APIs that enterprise developers regularly need to work with. The session also explored many different tips and tricks to improve overall application performance:

It finished on a practical note with a group of slides covering database tuning and tracing of the complete enterprise Geodatabase stack.

From the ESRI Developer Summit - Tuesday March 18, 2008

jona4440 — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 01:43:00 GMT

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.

From the Dev Summit - Monday March 17, 2008

jona4440 — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 02:08:00 GMT

Craig Gillgrass, Colin Zwicker, Jessica Parteno and James MacKay gave a pre-conference talk today at the Developer Summit in Palm Springs called the Developers Guide to the Geodatabase. The session covered an overview of the geodatabase, some best practices, and showed several demos of how to work with the geodatabase API.

The talk drew a decent crowd of about 300 and generated some great discussion. Craig had a healthy 100% joke bombing percentage that drew some muffled sympathy laughs.

I pulled some slides from their presentation to post up on the blog and give you an idea of what the talk was about. All of the slides from the Dev Summit presentations will be publicly available on EDN. The full PDF of this presentation can be found HERE.

The presentation went into detail on tips and tricks, best practices, object model diagrams, and suggested programming patterns when using the geodatabase API.

The presentation outline for the session was the following:

The slide below gives a decent overview of the datasets that can be stored within a geodatabase, as well as some example behavior that the geodatabase can implement to manage data validation and data integrity:

This sample code on the efficient use of FindField was one of many helpful developer hints and best practices that were discussed during the session:

The presenters also touched on several key object model diagrams; this one describes the feature class object model which you need to understand when creating feature classes with the geodatabase API.

This pre-conference seminar was a good way to touch base with developers before the official kick-off to the 2008 Developer Summit.

The 2008 ESRI Developer Summit

jona4440 — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 23:46:00 GMT

We’re days away from the annual ESRI Developer Summit down in Palm Springs. A lot of team members from the geodatabase team are going to be there presenting technical sessions. We’ll also be able to meet one on one with you to talk about projects that you’re working on and answer questions.

Team members will be floating around our designated island in the showcase area in between sessions, so you can come and find us there. We’ll be more than happy to talk and there will be lots of team members with varied areas of expertise, so we can direct specific questions to the right person.

Perhaps the best time to mingle with the geodatabase team is during the ‘Meet the Development Team’ session. This is being held on Wednesday from 1:30 – 2:30 in the showcase area.

Our team is giving 5 technical sessions and 1 pre-conference seminar this year:

·        Developer's Guide to the Geodatabase : Monday afternoon

·        Effective Geodatabase Programming : Tuesday 2:45 – 4:00, Thursday 1:30 – 2:45

·        Working with the geodatabase effectively using SQL : Tuesday 4:30 – 5:45

·        Implementing Enterprise Applications with the Geodatabase : Wednesday 2:45 – 4:00

·        Distributed Geodatabase Development : Wednesday 4:30 – 5:45, Thursday 8:30 – 9:45

·        Developing with Rasters in ArcGIS : Thursday 8:30 – 9:45

Members of the development team will be on location and posting to the blog throughout the Dev Summit, so check back for updates and info from each day of the conference.