The decision to move towards opensource software is one that more and more organisations are making, and there are many reasons for doing so. We are moving along the route slowly, but surely. Most of our back-end and infrastructure software is now opensource, whilst we are still investigating alternatives to the mainly closed source desktop packages. Today, I read a series of posts about making the difficult choice between different opensource solutions.

I have made a little more progress with evaluating the various free options for accessing PostgreSQL/Postgis database tables from ArcMap. I have to confess that some of the problem was down to my own lack of experience with Postgis! The issue that I had with PGarc was that it would fail with an error if you had deleted tables from a database. It turns out that this is because deleting tables using the PostgreSQL “DROP TABLE” syntax does not remove it’s reference in the “Geometry_Columns” table.