Bye, bye Shapefile? | Christian Spanring

Thanks to planet geospatial I almost was able to attend ESRI’s International User Conference 2006 without even going to San Diego (and experience those nice travel adventures as others did).

Beside all improvements and new features (btw, can’t wait to see this animation thing demoing somewhere) and bug fixes of ArcGIS, one point called my attention: the File-Based Geodatabase.

Since they can be compressed and are cross platform (Linux, Solaris, and Windows), file-based geodatabases are a good choice for data publishing. Like it did with shapefiles, ESRI is providing an open API that will allow anyone to create and use file-based geodatabases.

Is the File-Based Geodatabase going to be the next Shapefile?

Quite an ambitious project considering that, as far as I know, every piece of software dealing with geographic data is able to read (most of them even to write) a Shapefile. I’m not that long in the GIS business world, but I know the Shapefile as de-facto standard for quick geographic data exchange.

A major advantage of Shapefiles (and the Personal Geodatabase) is that you can access and edit attribute data without the need of a GIS client. In case of Shapefiles just fire up Excel (or any other DBF editor), access, read or change the attributes you want and save them back to the file (if you used Excel, be careful).

Will it be possible with File-Based Geodatabases too?

E.g. while working with ArcReader the non-ArcMap user can open Access and update the whole attribute set without any difficulty. A common and highly appreciated workflow in my environment.

However, in times of increasing importance of easily accessible geographic data the Open Geodatabases concept looks promising:

It is no longer necessary to access geodatabases via ESRI software products; the technology and documentation easily support direct access from other products and systems.

http://www.spatiallyadjusted.com James Fee

Well the problem with the file geodatabase is support. Initially there will only be access to these file geodatabases via ArcGIS. ESRI plans not to release the spec for the geodatabase because they felt some of the shapefile converters were not high enough quality (their words not mine). There are plans to release a SDK, but no mention on what that might include or how one could use it to access file geodatabases outside of ArcGIS.
http://slashgeo.org Alexandre Leroux

I think it’s time to get a new widely-used vector format to replace shapefiles. I just don’t see it happening anytime soon… See this poll which provides some interesting comments: http://slashgeo.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=13&aid=-1
Cheers!
http://spanring.eu/ Christian

So the file geodatabase only makes sense if you want to improve geodata access speed and probably geodata handling in a single use environment. For sharing your data with non-ESRI software (not to forget ArcGIS 8.3 and ArcView 3) you need to convert everything to Shapefiles again to be on the (interoperable) safe side. I wonder if the perfomance boost over the Shapefile is high enough to make the conversion processes worth.
http://www.spatiallyadjusted.com James Fee

Christian, I think at 9.2, the File Geodatabase is really only for those who want to improve the speed of their Geodatabases in the personal geodatabase or those who want Geodatabase support on Linux/UNIX.

Shapefiles are still very fast and probably the safest place to store your data when you want to interop with outer worlds.
http://surveying-mapping-gis.blogspot.com Dave Smith

File-based GeoDatabase? Good potential… excellent for portability of cartographic-quality mapping data, but not necessarily good in this era of interoperability and reuse mandates.

The comments about not opening it up seem a little disingenuous. Eventually someone will likely reverse-engineer the format, and develop a tool to edit/manage/update/query it outside of the ArcGIS millieu. There are any number of use cases I can think of (not that any of them intend to bypass ArcGIS) – such as process automation, components which directly query the GeoDatabase, aggregation, analysis and BI tools, et cetera… Third party ESRI partners would need that kind of access as well.

Yes, unknown risks exist – that tool may be marginal, prone to corruption, or have other limitations. It could on the other hand be a wonderful component that someone shares out to the GIS community. I do hope that the good people at ESRI also see this possibility, and perhaps consider taking that bull by the horns to make sure it is a good thing, as opposed to being a bad thing.
Doug

James, another reason for file geodatabases over shapefiles is that a file GDB can grow past the 2GB shapefile limit, and file GDBs support topologies, geometric networks, raster catalogs, terrains, etc, etc.
DR.A.V.SUBBA RAO

A GOOD PACKAGE TO WORK WITH ABSOLUTE EASE, A COMPREHENSIVE GEODATABASE IS THE NEED OF THE HOUR.
DR.ANDUGULAPATI
Ross

Another good point that seems to be lost here is that shape file does not have a true topology framework and doesnot have the ability to use behavior or rules, let alone good feature linked annotation. Only in Geodatabase or Coverage (gasp I said it) is there true topology.
Matteo

the geodatabase and the shapefile are dead! the future is the kml. a xml based file format
http://spanring.eu/ Christian

XML is good for interoperability and exchange, not for storage or processes where performance is crucial.