ArcSDE™ software is part of the ESRI® ArcGIS™ family of software products that integrates geographic information query, mapping, spatial analysis and editing within a multi-user enterprise DBMS environment.

ArcSDE enables an organization to move from the traditional approach of managing collections of geographic data files (also called location or vector data), raster data, and common computer aided design (CAD) data, to a new integrated environment where all spatial data is managed as a continuous database, accessible to the entire organization, and easily published on the Web. This change provides the foundation that enables geographic information system (GIS) technology to be integrated within an organization's standard information technology infrastructure. As a core component of the information infrastructure, spatial data is finally available to anyone in an organization for fundamental business activities such as mapping customer locations, selecting sites, routing and logistics, managing and designing facilities, market research, customer services and customer care, territory planning and spatial-based data mining.

With ArcSDE, you can benefit from many features including

• Flexibility and Performance ArcSDE significantly improves the performance of a complete GIS system by distributing the GIS application between the database server, the client, and the ArcSDE application server. Performance is enhanced through storage methods that provide a fast and compact representation for spatial data.
  
   

• Database Portability You can move data from one DBMS to another without loss of information through ArcSDE data export and import capabilities.
  
   

• Schema Portability ArcSDE defines a single logical model for spatial data implemented on top of the particular physical database. ESRI GIS applications and applications developed with ArcSDE's Java and C API will run with little or no change regardless of the underlying DBMS.
  
   

• Data Integrity ArcSDE manages the integrity of point, line and polygon information added to the database and will not allow ill-formed feature geometry to be inserted (for example a polygon's boundaries must be closed). In addition, ArcInfo and the ArcSDE gateway can be used to implement additional integrity constraints that are not practical to implement in the DBMS itself (for example you can add editing rules to prevent overlapping polygons or connectivity rules for utility networks).
  
   

• Application Programming Interface ArcSDE provides GIS functions for advanced application development through open, high-level C and Java APIs for querying and processing spatial information.
  
   

• Reduced Database and Application Development Costs ArcInfo's ArcObjects, ArcSDE's Java and C APIs, and MapObjects allow developers to choose the appropriate tools to quickly create focused applications and custom data loaders.