Connect to ESRI Personal Geodatabase

[Ken Lord]

Sorry if this is a double post, Joel tried to post the following message to 
the list and it bounced for him, so i'm making sure the message is here for 
all to see.
 It seems ESRI may be throwing a wrench into our personal geodatabase plans 
....
 (From Joel Schalgel)
 The latest issue of ArcNews reports that the MS Access geodatabase is being 
phased out at 9.2 and that a new "File Based Geodatabase" will be the 
preferred storage format. The file based geodatabase will be cross platform 
and have an open api. 
 
http://www.esri.com/news/arcnews/summer05articles/managing-spatial-data.html
 see the second to last paragraph ..
 joel
 ..... I'm not sure how this may affect our plans, or if we should delay and 
re-focus on developing support for MapServer to use the new format once it 
becomes available.
 I don't know what the release date of ArcGIS 9.2 is, we only just received 
our 9.1 subscription upgrade recently. What a pain! will this mean our 
clients will also have to upgrade to 9.2?
 Cheers,
Ken Lord
Vancouver BC

 On 7/6/05, Ken Lord <kenlord at gmail.com> wrote: 
> 
> Nice to see this topic is gaining interest!
>  Mike, Craig, Alex, I'll forward Frank's quote to you plus some 
> questions/answers that have gone back and forth between us. Perhaps there's 
> some important issues or features I missed that you guys could toss into 
> this. 
>  Over here, (BGC Engineering Inc in Vancouver BC), we'd love to see this 
> project go ahead with a couple partners to share the cost.
>  I'll be out of the office (camping in the Okanagen!) between July 8th and 
> July 20th. During that time if anyone needs to contact me regarding this 
> endevour, please contact Gerry James ( gjames AT bgcengineering.ca<http://bgcengineering.ca/>).
>  Cheers,
> Ken Lord
> Vancouver BC
> 
> 
>  On 7/6/05, Frank Warmerdam <fwarmerdam at gmail.com> wrote: 
> > 
> > On 7/6/05, Frank Warmerdam <fwarmerdam at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On 7/6/05, Mike Davis <mike.and.kerry at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > Funding things where I work is like pulling teeth, but I will 
> > inquire
> > > > with the "powers that be" to see if it is possible, this is a 
> > feature 
> > > > we would really like to have (especially if the performace is close 
> > to
> > > > that of shapefiles).
> > 
> > Mike,
> > 
> > There are two main issues affecting performance.
> > 
> > 1) Spatial indexing. Personal geodatabase does have a spatial 
> > index table associated with spatial tables. If we can properly utilize
> > this we ought to be able to grab small spatial regions out of big tables
> > effeciently. If not, it will be as corresponding slow as a shapefile 
> > would 
> > be without a spatial index. I'm not really confident I can utilize the
> > spatial index yet though. I looked at a sample file Howard provided,
> > and the index table just had 0's and -1's in the spatial index table. 
> > I don't know if I was using too old a version of MS Access to look at 
> > it,
> > or if it wasn't built or what.
> > 
> > 2) ODBC and OGR translation overhead. Both of these layers add
> > significant performance drag.
> > 
> > I can't give any real guarantees for performance, but if we can get
> > spatial indexing working it shouldn't be too much worse than direct
> > shapefiles.
> > 
> > Best regards,
> > --
> > ---------------------------------------+-------------------------------------- 
> > 
> > I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, 
> > warmerdam at pobox.com
> > light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam 
> > and watch the world go round - Rush | Geospatial Programmer for Rent
> > 
> 
>
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