topic Re: Stata to Geodatabase Conversion (400-500 fields in .dta file) in Data Management Questions

Stata to Geodatabase Conversion (400-500 fields in .dta file)

DanielSheehan — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 15:25:22 GMT

What is the best way to convert a Stata file into a geodatabase? I have many fields, 400-500, the Stata file. I have Stat Transfer and I usually transfer from Stata to .dbf but when there's this many fields it will not work.

Re: Stata to Geodatabase Conversion (400-500 fields in .dta file)

VinceAngelo — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 15:36:23 GMT

Are you looking to transfer to a file geodatabase or an ArcSDE database?

Which version of ArcGIS? If ArcSDE, which database?

- V

Re: Stata to Geodatabase Conversion (400-500 fields in .dta file)

DanielSheehan — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 15:38:51 GMT

ArcGIS 10, File Geodatabase

In addition if some of the Stata fields begin with underscores, at what point and in what software can I change these? I'm assuming FGDB does not like field names that start with underscores.

Re: Stata to Geodatabase Conversion (400-500 fields in .dta file)

VinceAngelo — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 15:59:54 GMT

Most pre-10 ArcSDE database limit the column count to 256, but at 10.0 the ArcSDE limit was
increased to 500 (SE_MAX_COLUMNS). The FGDB limit is 64K fields, but I believe they must
start with a character ([A-Z](A-Z0-9_)* - SQL requirement).

You're probably going to have to code this from scratch, so it doesn't really matter where you
make the change. The fastest approach would use C++ (either ArcObjects or FileGDB API),
but if you don't have a lot of rows, C# or Python won't slow you down too much.

What interface do you have at the Stata end for accessing raw data? Or would you plan to use
ASCII for interchange?

- V