GIS is a mature industry, with its roots in the late 60s in forestry and county polygon maintenance through vector topology (other such as GRASS and IDRISI concentrated on the raster domain). Storing location and attribute information has been a challenge, not only since the early days of severely limited computing power and storage space, but even today in the management of ever-growing spatial and tabular repositories. Tis has been handled in several ways: two tenors being Esri Arc/ Info separating the spatial and the tabular repositories, and Oracle spatial embedding them in database tables. Esri envolved from the desktop to the server by offering SDE, the layer between its data and RDBMS efectively spatialises database tables.
After the arrival of the internet further webservuce have been devised by commercial and open source technologies alike but that is the subject in its own right? and while RDBMS scales hardware such as Oracle Exadata, as data expands to petabytes in real time, our other arena such as Amazone service or SAP in strip memory addresses big data. But what about geodata?.
ArcGIS for server is the third generation that add a host of management, integrity, and performance tools design to help implement scalable enterprise GIS.
(Rak 1)