Inside the Geodatabase

Happy New Year from the Geodatabase Team

2008-12-31T21:19:00Z

2008 was an exciting year for the team, one of the highlights was launching this blog during the 2008 Developer Summit. Since then the team has enjoyed exploring this new medium by sharing their knowledge with geodatabase users through various posts. While we are thrilled with the comments we have recieved so far we would love to hear some feedback on what you think of the blogs in hopes of improving the blog for users in 2009. In the spirit of New Years, the Geodatabase Team would like to make some...(read more)

Using the ComReleaser to manage the lifetime of cursors in .NET

2008-12-18T20:36:00Z

Geodatabase cursors should always be explicitly destroyed in a runtime environment that uses garbage collection. The rule of thumb is to always release a COM object as soon as the application is done using the reference. This is especially important with geodatabase cursors because failing to dispose of cursors can put locks on system and DBMS resources; a common symptom of this is having a table remain locked for an indeterminate amount of time after you’ve finished iterating through its rows with...(read more)

Tips for using color correction on raster datasets

2008-12-08T21:04:00Z

Color correction is a new feature that is offered at ArcGIS 9.3. We’ve been getting some questions about what it is and how to use it, so I talked to the raster team and they helped put this post together. Color correction can be applied during a mosaicking process or to an existing raster catalog. It is used to make the catalog or mosaic appear seamless. Color correction consists of color balancing and color matching options: Color balancing aggregates the statistics from all pixels, and then balances...(read more)

Geodatabase replication and compress

2008-11-25T17:15:00Z

There is new documentation available which talks about some best practices when using the compress command while also employing geodatabase replication. Compress is a process run periodically by an ArcSDE administrator to reduce the size of the geodatabase and improve performance. Replicas in the ArcSDE geodatabase can affect the compress process. This paper describes best practices for achieving an effective compress when there are replicas. It is recommended that you first have an intermediate...(read more)

Podcast on Migrating to the Geodatabase now available

2008-11-18T21:59:00Z

To follow up on our last post, this is just a heads up to tell you that Derek Law’s podcast for Migrating to the Geodatabase is now online. The podcast talks about how to migrate existing data into the geodatabase. Derek goes over migration details for 5 of the more common data types: tables, shapefiles, CAD, coverages and imagery. The podcast is intended for GIS managers and GIS analysts who are new to working with geodatabases and would like to learn more about how to convert and use their existing...(read more)

Migrating your existing data into the Geodatabase

2008-11-11T23:15:00Z

While I was at the user conference earlier this year I was getting a lot of questions about migrating to the geodatabase from other data formats. I talked it over with Derek Law and he thought he’d make a podcast about it (we’ll link to that podcast when it hits the net). After seeing the script for his podcast I decided that some introductory style posts would also be a good way to get the info out to our users. So this is the first in a series of posts that will be addressing how to migrate to...(read more)

Object initializers and the Geodatabase API

2008-11-07T21:33:00Z

This post was provided by geodatabase product engineer James MacKay A new approach to initializing objects was introduced at .NET 3.0: object initializers . These allow objects to be instantiated and initialized in a single line, provided the class has a constructor with an appropriate accessibility level. An instance of an ESRI.ArcGIS.Geometry.Point can be created using the following code at .NET 3.0: IPoint point = new PointClass { X = 3.5, Y = 5.8 }; There are numerous places in the Geodatabase...(read more)

List of Useful Developer Samples

2008-10-27T16:58:00Z

Last week I was in Palm Desert at the annual EGUG conference . While sitting in on a presentation I noticed that for a lot of the questions being asked, users were being directed to developer samples found online. I realized that while these samples are readily available, it was clear that not everyone knew about them or where to get them. So I talked to Larry Young, who had moderated the session, and he put together the following list of developer samples that could prove helpful: One to many labels...(read more)

Three new How-To articles in Geodatabase SDK

2008-10-20T15:50:00Z

For all geodatabase developers out there, we’ve added three new how-to articles to the online SDK: How to use edit sessions : The in’s and out’s of editing a geodatabase are explained in this article, and supported with several code examples. It includes an introductory section on the basics of edit sessions and edit operations, useful patterns such as how to handle errors that occur while editing, and information about handling more advanced scenarios, like how to reconcile changes at the end of...(read more)

New help topics provided on geodatabase replication

2008-10-13T23:05:00Z

More information on geodatabase replication has recently been added to the help system and to KB articles. This should help address some of the more commonly asked questions. The following describes the new information and where to find it: Replicating with relationship classes where the primary key is the objectid column There are some factors to bear in mind when replicating data where there are relationship classes that use the ObjectID column as the primary key. The 9.3 desktop help has been...(read more)

Do the new reconcile options work against older releases of ArcSDE geodatabases?

2008-10-06T03:24:00Z

This was a question I got from a friend in tech support the other day and it's a pretty good one. Short answer is yes, here's why: At 9.2 we added a number of different reconcile options offering users more flexibility when reconciling versions in an ArcSDE geodatabase. For those reading this that are wondering what a reconcile is or how versioning works I would suggest reading the Understanding Version section in the ArcGIS desktop web help. As the graphic below shows, at ArcGIS 9.2 we augmented...(read more)

.NET Team adds API Evaluator

2008-10-01T21:00:00Z

A quick post today about a new tool that the .NET team developed. The API evaluator scans your .NET code and generates a complete set of API usage statistics. This is pretty cool if you want to see what APIs are being used most frequently in your applications. It also provides a way for you to send feedback directly to ESRI about the APIs that are most important to you....(read more)

Working with the Connect and Disconnect commands when editing a Geometric Network

2008-09-25T18:04:00Z

The following post was contributed by Craig Gillgrass a product engineer on the geodatabase team who spends the lion’s share of his time working with geometric networks. The topic of when to use the Connect and Disconnect commands when editing geometric network features came up a couple times during our Geometric Network session. Based on those discussions and other questions from users I’ve re-written the help topic on these commands. What follows is a variation of the new help topic which should...(read more)

ArcGIS Image Server vs ArcSDE - Comparison of managed raster datasets

2008-09-12T18:51:00Z

Given the response to our last raster post and the interest in image server, I talked with the Raster team to see if we could do a follow up post which compared storing rasters in a geodatabase to using image server. Melanie Harlow, a product engineer on the raster team, directed me to an in-house paper which does exactly that. We were thinking about turning this information into a white paper, but given the amount of interest I thought I’d post it up here first so people can get a look at it. Hopefully...(read more)

New Error Reporting in ArcGIS 9.3

2008-09-08T21:34:00Z

One of the new capabilities in ArcGIS 9.3 is the ability to send error reports to ESRI any time that ArcGIS fails. We thought we’d try to explain our reasons for adding this capability to our software and what it can do to help us build more stable, robust software for you. We know that software crashes are one of the most important quality issues that you face in using ArcGIS. Our goal is to eliminate situations where an ArcGIS application crashes. These types of errors occur in many situations...(read more)