Connections to 9.3 geodatabases

This post was submitted by Kim Peter who is a product engineer and technical writer on the geodatabase development team

In order to take advantage of new functionality added to the geodatabase in a release of ArcGIS, the geodatabase must be upgraded.  This will be the case with ArcGIS 9.3, as we’ve added new functionality to terrains and network datasets:

• Creating a terrain with the new window size pyramid format.
• Creating a network dataset with an attribute that uses the new global turn delay and network function evaluators.

To see how you can upgrade a geodatabase to the 9.3 release, consult the help topics Upgrading file and personal geodatabases, Upgrading geodatabases on database servers, and Upgrade summary for ArcSDE geodatabases.

However, this doesn’t mean that you need to upgrade your ArcGIS 9.3 clients to 9.3 in order to connect to and use 9.3 geodatabases. You will still be able to connect from a client with ArcGIS 9.2 SP5 or later service pack to a 9.3 geodatabase. For example, if a coworker sends you a file geodatabase he or she created with an ArcGIS Desktop 9.3 client, you can open and edit it in your ArcGIS 9.2 SP5 client.

As with previous geodatabase upgrades, if you decide not to upgrade your geodatabases but you do install the 9.3 release of the client software, you will be able to connect from the 9.3 client to 9.2 geodatabases. If you don’t need to take advantage of the new functionality for terrains and network datasets, the geodatabase upgrade is optional and not required.

Be aware, though, there are a couple of caveats to these inter-release connections.

They are as follows:

• You have to have at least service pack 5 applied to the client application to be able to connect and edit from a 9.2 client to a geodatabase that has been upgraded to the 9.3 release.

• If connecting from a 9.2 SP5 or SP6 client to a 9.3 geodatabase, you will have all the 9.2 functionality available to you.

• If connecting from an ArcGIS 9.3 client to a geodatabase that has not been upgraded from 9.2, ArcGIS will prevent you from using 9.3 functionality in the geodatabase.

• If making direct connections from the client application to an ArcSDE geodatabase, additional drivers need to be installed. This configuration will be discussed in a future blog post.