The Economy and GIS Jobs

The GIS Jobs Clearinghouse job postings appear steady and there are even a couple of fat days!

And there have been no shortage of recruiters calling for GIS positions over the past few weeks.  I know a lot engineering firms have taken a hit with the economy and that will affect their GIS positions.  There are a even a some brave souls who are starting companies (Superior GIS Solutions  and JSA GIServices come to mind).

It appears that large swaths of the GIS employment landscape are immune in this economy.  Perhaps even thriving because of it.

zigGIS & SQL Server 2008

I'm gettting excited!

How many ArcEditor/ArcInfo licenses exist in the world for the sole purpose of basic featureclass editing?  

I can speak from experience that it is not easy to "sell" a free RDBMS like PostgreSQL.  But a lot of organizations are comfortable with Microsoft and you know they will eventually end up on SQL Server 2008 (or higher).  So being able to edit GIS data in SQL Server 2008 with an ArcView license + zigGIS is very compelling (http://bit.ly/2w4YOy). 

zigGIS 2.0.2 isn't going to have SQL Server 2008, but it looks like they are heading in that direction.  I always thought that zigGIS was a good candidate for this sort of thing.  

ArcGIS Version Confusion

Can you edit older geodatabases with newer ArcGIS clients?  

I thought 'yes'.   I learned 'no'.  At least for cases where you have a geometric network in your feature datasets.

I haven't had any issues writing to older sql server  or oracle 9.2 geodatabases, but replica check-outs to a file database don't fare as well.  The check-out goes well.  So does the check-in.  But reconcile attempts within the 9.2 geodatabase fail with geometry errors (even if no geometry is edited).   

ESRI Support used to instruct us to keep ArcGIS versions  and geodatabases versions matched when editing (e.g. edit 9.2 SP5 geodatabases with ArcMap 9.2 SP5).  

This is still the case in many situations despite what some may say.  The only question is: for which situations is this the case?  I have no idea. So if it's important data, match the application versions--just to be safe.