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Is anyone aware of any plugins, or any other way to connect and view data from an ArcSDE database in Quantum GIS desktop?

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Removed the gis tag; it's "meta" for this site: blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags – JasonBirch Aug 13 '10 at 23:28
How does MapServer do it? It's C and OGR based, and so is QGIS. Maybe there's a way like Matt Wilkie says. – Duarte Carreira Nov 17 '10 at 12:15

5 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

It may be possible to build a bridge through GDAL/OGR's ArcSDE driver. It's not compiled in by default and needs some pieces of the ESRI SDE C API to connect. So to build this driver you need to have a copy of the SDE C API developer kit from ESRI. If memory serves, there is a pre-compiled sde driver floating around that can use ArcInfo Workstation installed on the local machine in place of the SDK.

Sources:

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I think the ArcInfo thing was only for reading ArcInfo binary coverages from GDAL. It has long since been deprecated. – Howard Butler Sep 29 '11 at 14:44
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I am glad to say I have it working! I'm using QGIS 1.7 from OSGeo4W:

1) get the ogr_sde.dll (compile it from Tamas http://vbkto.dyndns.org/sdk/, you also need some ArcSDE sdk files)
2) replace the gdal18.dll used by qgis with the one you compiled above
3) put ogr_sde.dll in C:\OSGeo4W\bin\gdalplugins\1.8
4) create an .vrt file with your ArcSDE connection and feature classe details
5) add the vrt to QGIS, and voila!

Thing is, ogr takes a long time to connect. But viewing is ok. Just the connecting part is way too slow. Maybe someone figures out a parameter for the connection to speed it up.

Duarte

EDIT: forgot you also have to copy the following DLLs from your compilation in step 1: xerces-c_28.dll, spatiallite.dll and openjpeg.dll. You also need the ArcSDE libs: sde.dll, sg.dll, and pe.dll. Just put them in C:\OSGeo4W\bin.

EDIT 2: more info here: http://www.qgis.org/wiki/Connecting_to_ArcSDE_databases.

EDIT 3: the conection time is no longer a problem. Just a matter of correct connection string in the vrt. See the link for examples.

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If you want SDE rasters, you want the gdal_sde.dll as well... – Howard Butler Sep 29 '11 at 14:44
up vote 2 down vote

If you use Postgres as your backend DB of ArcSDE, you have the option of storing spatial data in ST_Geometry (SDE spatial format) or PG_Geometry (PostGIS spatial format). If you store the data in PostGIS enabled DB and specify the PG_Geometry option when you import the data (optionally you can edit dbtune, I believe, to set PG_Geometry as the default), you will be able to connect to the data via an SDE connection or via a desktop client that can connect directly to PostGIS (such as QGIS)

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up vote 0 down vote

You can connect directly to the underlying database (PostGIS, Oracle or personal geodatabase), there should be no need (and maybe no way) to use ArcSDE as middle-ware.

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There is currently no way. If you were to use one of the Java based FOSS4G tools it should be possible using the SDE connector in geotools. I think this is how geoserver connects to SDE.

There is currently no data provider in the C++ world that plugs in to QGIS

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