I was up late the other night working on the portfolio page and trying to see if I could make it to the Super Blue Blood Moon (best viewing time for Alaska was 4:30AM.) As it got later I lost steam and started googling how I could possibly use my geology background in conjunction with web development. Even though I haven’t gotten far (at all) I would like a somewhat reasonable path laid out for all of this effort. There are more jobs in front end web dev, and from what I can tell it’s easier to navigate entry-level positions.
However, the rabbit hole brought me to the LinkedIn pages for two companies which specialize in earth science repositories and mapping solutions for software and the web. I’m primarily interested in a GIS analysis/developer position because I spent several years working with remote sensing planetary data. It doesn’t hurt to research, so here are some subjects worthy of a google search:
- ESRI SDE Framework– ESRI stands for Environmental Systems Research Institute. It is the organization which produces GIS software. They own the Arc suites and related geodatabase applications. SDE (Spatial Database Engine) Framework, or ArcSDE…actually, it’s a little over my head. Here’s an explanation from the company about how SDE is now included (but wasn’t prior to v 9.2) in ArcGIS:
In the past, ArcSDE was sold as a separate Esri product. Starting with ArcGIS 9.2, ArcSDE technology is included as capabilities within ArcGIS rather than being offered separately. ArcSDE technology has been integrated into ArcGIS for Desktop, ArcGIS Engine, and ArcGIS for Server so that users can scale their DBMS-based geodatabases across their organizations.
And in more laymen terms from The Department of Geography at Penn State:
ArcSDE is software that enables ArcGIS applications to store, manage and retrieve data in a RDBMS. The “Arc” comes from the ubiquitous naming convention used by Esri for their products. The SDE part stands for Spatial Database Engine.
ArcSDE is sometimes described as middleware, a layer of software that sits between Esri’s ArcGIS products and RDBMS software and manages data exchanges between them. It makes it possible for GIS data users to utilize their data without need for special knowledge of the underlying RDBMS.
As of ArcGIS 10, ArcSDE supports the commercial RDBMS’s Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, and Informix, and the free and open-source PostgreSQL.
- Oracle RDBMS Framework, including SQL- First, I need to define RDBMS or Relational Database Management System. It is (via techtarget.com)-
a program that lets you create, update, and administer a relational database. Most commercial RDBMS’s use the Structured Query Language (SQL) to access the database, although SQL was invented after the development of the relational model and is not necessary for its use.
Which explains Oracle-
“The leading RDBMS products are Oracle, IBM’s DB2 and Microsoft’s SQL Server.”
So Oracle RDBMS-
“Oracle Database is built on top of SQL, a standardized programming language that database administrators, data analysts and other IT professionals use to manage databases and query the data stored in them. The Oracle software is tied to PL/SQL, an implementation developed by Oracle that adds a set of proprietary programming extensions to standard SQL — a common practice among RDBMS vendors. Oracle Database also supports programming in Java, and programs written in PL/SQL or Java can be called from the other language.”
- DB Procedures, Functions and PLSQL
- ESRI Geodatabase Technology
- .Net (C#,VB)
- ESRI .Net ArcObjects for Arc Products for 10.1 or later
- ESRI WMX Framework and the ability to Develop Custom Steps, along with OTS methods
- WMX Repository Framework and WMX workflows capabilities for Desktop and ArcGIS Server
- Visio
- Office Automation
- ESRI – Environmental Systems Research Institute
- GeoServer
- OGC
- Metadata Standards
I’m familiar with ArcGIS, but perhaps not that familiar. I have a lot of homework to do.
Rocks to Web 