Geographic Technologies Incorporated in Australia originally designed the database software, named Spatial DataBase Engine. Development shifted to Salamanca Software Pvt Ltd., which developed the first production version. SDBE originally used the InterBaseDBMS. The president of Esri, Jack Dangermond, announced SDE at the GIS'95 conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Esri purchased Salamanca Software in 1996. Esri rebranded the software as "ArcSDE" to follow the naming convention of other products. ArcSDE grew to meet the need of users of geographic data for robust multi-user editing, storage and access of extremely large geospatial databases. ArcSDE supports the Esri geodatabase implementation. The product began as stand-alone software: Esri integrated it into ArcGIS version 9.2. In 2013 ESRI announced plans to deprecate the ArcSDE command line tools and the ArcSDE application server following the forthcoming release of ArcGIS 10.2.
with the release of 10.1, Esri sells ArcSDE as a component of ArcGIS Server - part of the ArcGIS family of software products which integrates geographic-information query, mapping, spatial analysis, and editing within a multi-user enterprise DBMS environment.
ArcSDE alternative tools
After 2010, there are some alternative tools for connecting ArcMap with DBMS Postgres, SQL Server.. such as and .
Functionality
ArcSDE enables organizations to move from a traditional approach — managing separate collections of geographic data files — to an integrated environment in which one can manage spatial data as a continuous database: accessible to the entire organization simultaneously and easily publishable on the Web. ArcSDE as an application server facilitates storing and managing spatial data in a DBMS and makes the data available to many applications. ArcSDE allows one to manage spatial data in any of four commercial databases. Starting with the 9.3 release, Esri added support for the open-source PostgreSQL database. ArcSDE serves data for the advanced ArcGIS Desktop products ; the ArcGIS development products, ArcView 3.x as well as ArcIMS. It is a key component in managing a multi-user Esri-based GIS. While traditional RDBMS software keeps track of the tables and records contained in the database, ArcSDE pushes the relational model higher so that client software can manage geographic data - which comprise several tables - seamlessly. The user need have no awareness of nor dealings with the particulars of the RDBMS. The GIS environment routes all connections to the database through the ArcSDE middleware, which manages the storing and retrieval of data.
