[postgis-users] Enormous file geodatabase feature class > PostgreSQL/PostGIS? + attribute column standardization app or process?

[Frank Warmerdam]

dnrg wrote:
> Is there a utility for importing an ESRI file
> geodatabase into PostgreSQL/PostGIS? 

Dana,

You can use the ogr2ogr utility distributed as part
of GDAL/OGR.  The FWTools binaries for win32 include
both ESRI Geodatabase and PostGIS support, so with that
you could do something like:

ogr2ogr -update PG:dbname=yourdb bighonkinggeodb.mdb yourfeatureclassname

to load all the features in the layer yourfeatureclassname
into the postgres database yourdb from the personal
geodatabase bighonkinggeodb.mdb.

You may find it helpful to use ogrinfo on your .mdb
file to determine the name of layers as OGR sees them.

> Finally, does it look like ESRI will ever open its
> geodatabase format in the way they've opened up the
> shapefile? I tend to doubt it, considering all the
> stored procedures and triggers it must use to maintain
> the consistency of the data. But still, someone could
> do an implementation of it if the geodatabase format
> was fully documented and opened to others like they
> did with the shapefile.

The personal geodatabase format is reasonably reverse
engineerable via ODBC however so far the OGR driver is
readonly as creating the datasets in fully consistent
form is harder.

> Otherwise, I see no real commitment to
> interoperability--with the geodatabase being ESRI's
> format / data model / whatever you want to call it /
> of choice.

Reportedly the new file based geodatabase will be open
in some fashion in the future.  I suspect this will take
the form of an ESRI provided free (of cost) SDK rather
than a format specification or actual source code - but
details are not yet available as far as I know.

Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I think the would like
to be open, but it just isn't much of a priority.

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    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org