Back in the dark old days of ArcSDE, when it first started to support PostgreSQL/PostGIS as a back-end data store, I did a series of posts about how to work with it. Of course, working with PostGIS in ArcGIS was a theme of the early days of this blog, through my association with zigGIS. Although it’s been the case for a while, I’m feeling a bit happy today that it’s now as simple as this to work with (vanilla, non-geodatabased) PostGIS in ArcMap. (Post continues below the GIF.)
You might ask “Why not just work in QGIS?” and you would have a valid question. QGIS is a perfectly fine desktop PostGIS client. As a matter of fact, I went almost two years without a functioning copy of ArcMap and using QGIS as my primary desktop tool (which is why I’m exploring the capabilities of ArcGIS 10.4 now). Sometimes, projects dictate what tools you need to use. The data-level interoperability implied by the support shown above has me thinking about hybrid workflows to allow shops (especially small ones) that have need for final products to end up in an Esri stack to still exercise a measure of choice with regard to tools. It may be time to re-tool that old series of posts for the state of GIS tools circa the middle of this decade.
