Inside the Geodatabase : Geodatabase Essentials

Training Spotlight: The Geodatabase

JonMurphy — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 18:04:00 GMT

Well the conference is over and it's back to Redlands. We've been getting a lot of good feedback about the tech sessions and demo theatres, I'll get the Geodatabase Essentials sessions on here later this week. I hope everyone who attended the conference...(read more)

Geodatabase Presentations from the 2009 Dev Summit

JonMurphy — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 20:27:00 GMT

This week ESRI hosted the annual Developer Summit down in Palm Springs. The geodatabase team was there to answer user’s questions, announce a few of the 9.4 projects that are in the works, and give several technical sessions. I’ve gathered the slides...(read more)

Geodatabase Management Learning Pathway

JonMurphy — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:34:00 GMT

ESRI’s Training and Education department is now offering several learning pathways . These learning pathways define a set of ESRI training courses which are designed to focus on a particular aspect of GIS. Specific to the geodatabase among these is a...(read more)

Implementing and managing ArcSDE geodatabases on SQL Server Express - New Podcast Series

JonMurphy — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:42:00 GMT

There is a series of 3 podcasts by Olena Smith worth checking out on the ESRI Instructional Series Podcasts site dealing with implementing and maintaining desktop and workgroup geodatabases. Desktop (aka personal ArcSDE geodatabase) and workgroup are...(read more)

Podcast on Migrating to the Geodatabase now available

JonMurphy — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 21:59:00 GMT

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...(read more)

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

brentardenpierce — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 18:04:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Geodatabase Essentials Presentations

JonMurphy — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:53:00 GMT

Following up on our UC presentations post , Brent and I are posting the tech workshop presentations we gave (with other members of the geodatabase team) down in San Diego at this year's user conference. You can check out the presentations in PDF format...(read more)

2008 User Conference - Geodatabase Presentations

JonMurphy — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:14:00 GMT

The 2008 ESRI International User Conference is roughly three weeks away and our team has been preparing technical workshops and demo theatres to present down in San Diego. Over the next few weeks we’ll be posting about these sessions so you can get a...(read more)

Geodatabase Essentials - Archiving

JonMurphy — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 21:48:00 GMT

Geodatabase archiving provides a mechanism for capturing and managing a record of your edits as features and rows are updated over time. This record is automatically updated as edits are saved and is available for query and analysis. This is handy when...(read more)

Geodatabase Essentials – Enterprise Geodatabases

JonMurphy — Wed, 07 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Derek Law has written an article titled Enterprise Geodatabase 101 which was recently posted on ArcUser Online. The article provides a general overview of the enterprise geodatabase looking at key features, architecture, and implementation. It is geared...(read more)

Geodatabase Essentials – Part I: What is the Geodatabase?

jona4440 — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:07:00 GMT

Now that the dev summit is over we can tone down the amateur journalism and get into some real topics. Seeing as how this blog is titled “Inside the Geodatabase”, I thought a good place to start would be an introductory topic on the geodatabase. So here is the first in a series of posts we’re calling “Geodatabase Essentials”. Future posts tagged with this title will contain introductory information laying the foundations for essential geodatabase topics.

What is the Geodatabase?

The geodatabase is the native data storage and data management framework for ArcGIS. Why would you want to use a geodatabase? Because it acts as an organizational tool to store and manage your data, and is also the gateway into advanced GIS capabilities.

The geodatabase is a container which houses a collection of various geographic datasets.

Geodatabases support all of the different types of data that can be used by ArcGIS. Also, there is a complete set of conversion tools available so you can easily migrate existing geospatial data into the geodatabase.

At face value the fundamental ArcGIS datasets are tables, feature classes, and rasters. These and other more complex datasets, such as topologies and geometric networks, are all contained within the geodatabase. The geodatabase can also add advanced capabilities to these datasets and model behavior. Some examples of this are:

Data Validation using domains and subtypes
Multiuser editing environment through versioning
Topologies to enforce the integrity of your spatial data
Networks to model and analyze flows
Terrains for modeling surfaces and Lidar data management
Distributed geodatabase replication
Managing historical archives of your data

There are 3 types of geodatabases: Personal, File, and ArcSDE.

Personal Geodatabases

Personal geodatabases were first introduced in ArcGIS 8.0 and are designed for a single user working with smaller datasets. They are stored and managed in Microsoft® Access™, which ties them to the windows platform.

One thing a lot of users like about the personal geodatabase is the ability to manage the tabular data using Access.

Access based personal geodatabases work well for small datasets and they support all the features of the geodatabase model such as topologies, raster catalogs, network datasets, address locators, etc…. They are single user and therefore do not support versioning and long transactions.

File Geodatabases

File geodatabases, introduced at ArcGIS 9.2, store datasets in a file system folder and are portable across operating systems. They are suitable for single user projects and small workgroups with one editor and multiple readers. Although they do not support versioning, it is possible to have multiple editors with a file geodatabase, providing they aren’t editing the same feature datasets, feature classes or tables.

The file geodatabase is optimized for use in ArcGIS so it provides very fast data use and storage, and can scale to over 1 terabyte in size. Also, the File geodatabase allows you to optionally compress your vector data, reducing the memory footprint used by its storage without affecting performance.

ArcSDE Geodatabases

ArcSDE geodatabases manage spatial data within an RDBMS such as DB2, Informix, Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL and SQL Server Express. Through this architecture, ArcSDE offers a multi-user editing environment and can manage extremely large datasets. ArcSDE geodatabases also support version-based workflows such as geodatabase replication and archiving that are not supported with file and personal geodatabases.

Organizations requiring the full suite of geodatabase functionality and a geodatabase with the capacity for extremely large, continuous GIS datasets that can be edited and accessed by many users should use an ArcSDE geodatabase.

9.3 Beta users can find this information and more on the Geodatabase Resource Center page.

Also for beta users, a few useful topics from the help system covering this information in more detail are: An overview of the geodatabase, Essential readings about the geodatabase, and Types of Geodatabases.

Users not in the beta program can access similar topics covering this information in more detail from the 9.2 web help. See An overview of the geodatabase and Types of geodatabases.