Split shapefile into smaller shapefiles using Python

DavidBarry1

Is there a way I can take a large shapefile and split it into several smaller shapefiles using Python? My point shapefile has about 62,000 records and I'm trying to spatially join it to a line feature class, but it's taking forever. I'm thinking if I was able to split it up that I could spatially join each "mini" shapefile and get through the process faster. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

XanderBakker

Sure you can, no problem, but maybe you want to test with a different format first. Have you tried loading your data into a File Geodatabase? This format may result in faster joins.

To split into shapefile into different featureclasses, how do you want to split them up, based on a spatial characteristics of simply taking a # number of records and writing them to a new featureclass?