Comments on: Bye, bye Shapefile?

By: Christian

Christian — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:24:52 +0000

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

By: Matteo

Matteo — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:42:21 +0000

the geodatabase and the shapefile are dead! the future is the kml. a xml based file format

By: Ross

Ross — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 23:07:05 +0000

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.

By: DR.A.V.SUBBA RAO

DR.A.V.SUBBA RAO — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 06:57:59 +0000

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

By: Doug

Doug — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 16:10:58 +0000

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.

By: Dave Smith

Dave Smith — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 00:03:49 +0000

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.

By: James Fee

James Fee — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 23:10:41 +0000

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.

By: Christian

Christian — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 22:07:37 +0000

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.

By: Alexandre Leroux

Alexandre Leroux — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 21:01:53 +0000

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!

By: James Fee

James Fee — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 20:34:19 +0000

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.