Hobu, Inc.

Thanks to a patch from Pirmin Kalberer at Sourcepole.com, experimental SDE raster support has been added to MapServer for the 4.4 release. SDE raster support will not be enabled by default when SDE support is requested. To enable it, you will have to define USE_SDERASTER along with the normal USE_SDE compiler symbols.

While much more information can be found in the wiki, here is a sample LAYER block that outlines what will need to be done to define a SDE raster layer:

  LAYER
    NAME         rastertest
    TYPE         RASTER
    CONNECTION "sdemachine.iastate.edu,port:5151,sde,username,password"
    CONNECTIONTYPE sde
    DATA "RASTERTEST,FOOTPRINT,SDE.DEFAULT"
    STATUS       ON
    DEBUG ON
    PROCESSING "BANDS=1,2,3,4"
    PROCESSING "RASTERCOLUMN=RASTER"

  END

As you can see, the support is a little hackish at this point, but I expect that things will settle down as we move through the 4.4 release into the 4.5/4.6 series. There is also some talk of moving all of the SDE support (rasters and vectors) into the more general GDAL/OGR libraries, but nothing has been done on that front yet.

Why is this significant? If you are in an (almost) all-ESRI shop, you now have no excuse to not give MapServer a try. Data formats are no longer an impediment to using MapServer for your web rendering needs. Why struggle with servlets, AXL files, restarting your server to make simple changes, and limited output formats with ArcIMS? With MapServer 4.4, you will be able to drop a Windows CGI executable (or similar unix-like binary) into your Apache cgi-bin directory and quickly give it a try. I think you’ll find you like it