QGIS gets Oracle support!

Posted on by Nathan

Seems this is a good day for QGIS Oracle users. According this commit made by Jürgen QGIS now has built-in Oracle support. Win!

Native Oracle support can now see QGIS being opened up to a wider user base yet again. A large user base normally means more people willing to sponsor awesome new features and bug fixes. Having seen the growth in the user base from having native MS SQL Server 2008+ support I can imagine what it will be like with Oracle.

The list of formats QGIS can open and edit is getting larger and larger with each release. Is there a future for vendor lock in? I can’t see it.

Standard disclaimer about latest dev build and new features :)

10 thoughts on “QGIS gets Oracle support!”

  2. As a old-time developer and user of MapInfo since 1992, it’s kind of sad seeing it’s slow demise. On the other hand I’m very pleased to offer QGIS to my customers as a worthy low cost alternative. One of the main limiting factors for using GIS on a large scale has been the licensing cost of the various proprietary GIS programs.
    I’m positive that the Oracle connection with editing capability will give QGIS a boost in my part of the world (Denmark).

  3. I’ll be curious to see how much impact it has on the QGIS user base, my impression is that folks who have the dough to spend on Oracle aren’t especially motivated by low licensing costs. Would it be reasonable to suppose that Oracle users newly firing up QGIS might be more interested in its other advantages?

  4. In Canada, the dominance of ESRI geodatabases still provides a pretty strong vendor lockin for a lot of organizations. If the QGIS technical team can crack that nut, I think that would provide another potential surge in growth for companies wanting to have a mixed environment, but having a lot of data locked into the geodatabases and SDE databases.

  5. Trevor, even if you use Geodatabases, you can opt to have them based on native spatial formats like Oracle Spatial/Locator, instead of basing them on the ESRI added spatial type.
    So this means that even if you buy Oracle and/or ESRI, there is a huge potential benefit on adding QGIS to your enterprise GIS portfolio: it opens your data to every possible user without scaling your licensing costs. Your spatial data becomes available to hardcore gis users and ad-hoc users alike.
    There are other benefits ofcourse, but that would take another post from Nathan! ;)

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