topic Re: Raster to point feature class in geodatabase in Data Management Questions

Raster to point feature class in geodatabase

NathanOdgers — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 14:16:47 GMT

I have a very large raster (46000 x 29000 cells). What I would like to do is to convert the raster to some kind of point feature class. I can't convert it to a point shapefile because of the 2Gb size limit, so is there any way to convert a raster to a point feature class inside a geodatabase? I tried to use the Raster to Point tool to create a point dataset inside a geodatabase but it didn't work�??apparently Raster to Point assumes the output is a shapefile and gives you the 2Gb limit error, even if you try to save it inside a geodatabase and don't use the .shp extension. Is there any way to do this successfully?

Re: Raster to point feature class in geodatabase

VinceAngelo — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 14:59:23 GMT

You really don't want a 1.3 billion point table anywhere -- Even with the best possible
performance, you're looking at a 30+ hour load time (and hours to do any meaningful
analysis).

If your points don't vary in value all that much, you might be able to map 1Kx1K pixel
chunks into a multi-point table (where all the points with the same value are merged into
a single feature) -- this will still be moderately unusable as tens of thousands of features
with tens of thousands of verticies.

Your best bet is to apply some classification scheme and convert the result into a polygon
table. Still unwieldy due to the vertex count, but better than the other options.

- V

Re: Raster to point feature class in geodatabase

GarthHoeppner — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 15:44:16 GMT

Same problem here. Rather inconvenient that ArcGIS makes an intermediate shapefile first, so the 2GB limit is basically in effect even for a file geodatabase.

Re: Raster to point feature class in geodatabase

VinceAngelo — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 15:42:52 GMT

Vector tables are easy to append to -- why not break your raster into managable pieces,
extract the multipoints for each part, and merge into a final product?

- V