ESRI International User Conference 2007
Q & A
Geodatabase & ArcSDE Technology
Q: What are ESRI’s plans for opening up access to the geodatabase?
ESRI will provide full and open access to the geodatabase using the following methods:
- A free and open API to the file geodatabase. * The file geodatabase was introduced at ArcGIS 9.2. While ESRI would ideally like to open the file geodatabase format in a manner similar to what we did for shapefiles when we released ArcView 2, geodatabases are complex and can be easily corrupted outside the ArcGIS environment. Instead, we plan to engineer a high performing and well documented API that developers can freely embed in custom applications and that will read and write file geodatabase datasets. This will be released after ArcGIS 9.3.
- Geodatabase GML. ESRI will release a full geodatabase GML schema with ArcGIS 9.3. This profile will be based on the OGC specifications and built on the simple feature GML specification adopted by OGC this past year.
* More about file geodatabase
File geodatabases store datasets as folders in a file system with each file capable of storing more than 1 TB of information. Each file geodatabase can hold any number of these large, individual datasets. File geodatabases can be used across all platforms and can be compressed. They support the complete geodatabase information model and are faster than using shapefiles for large datasets. Users are rapidly adopting the file geodatabase in place of using shapefiles.
