Greetings,

I got several replies to my query, all along the same lines.  Here is the
gist of my post:

        >  If I am  running Oracle with the Spatial extension, then I can
load shapes into my
        > database, and do spatial queries without ever looking at a map.
If I want
        > to view maps, not just do the queries on the shapes, and I have
ArcView, or
        > ArcMap,  why would I need SDE?  Is SDE required whenever one links
Oracle,
        > or Sybase, or SQLServer etc, to ArcView?

The replies were pretty consistent.  Nobody seems to have done it, but
everyone agrees it could be done.  If one has a simple application in mind,
simple queries, then there is no need for SDE, however, the speed of the
application, and one's ability to customize it with other application tools
is greatly enhanced by using SDE.  SDE is, of course, designed to enhance
the performance of the ESRI-RDBMS link.

So if you just want to do point-in-polygon queries for, say,
customers-as-points and zip code polygons, probably you could do without
SDE.  If you already have Oracle Spatial or the equivalent, that is.

Best,
Gary O.

        -------------------------------------------------
        Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!

                                Bartleby the Scrivener
                                         Herman Melville
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