What are the key benefits of using XE in a geospatial application from a developer perspective?
From the perspective of a geospatial application developer, XE provides some unique and compelling benefits. Most important is that every major GIS vendor supports Oracle s ability to store geometry. So if we use Oracle 10g or XE as our core geospatial data repository, we can be certain that ESRI, Autodesk, Intergraph, MapInfo, GE and many other GIS applications can all simultaneously take advantage of a single spatial data asset. Until PostGIS or another geospatial database attains this level of GIS vendor support, we see this as a key advantage of XE and Oracle 10g. In addition, any data or code that we develop within XE can be readily ported to Oracle 10g or Oracle Spatial. This makes XE an extremely attractive platform upon which to pilot and prove a geospatial workflow or application, because we and our clients can be confident that our efforts will easily integrate with enterprise technology. Since Oracle databases are everywhere, this is a big deal to our developers. Like Oracle
