topic Re: Help extracting 'Blob' geometry from Access DB in Geodatabase Questions

Help extracting 'Blob' geometry from Access DB

KiaMack — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 09:45:46 GMT

Hi Esri community!

I would be hugely grateful for your help on a problem I'm bashing my head against.

I've received what is supposed to be landcover vector data, but it is stored as a series of tables in an Access database. The one table which looks like an attribute table has the 'SHAPE' column formatted in 'Blob' (binary). I have no idea how to extract the geometry.

The guy who I got the files from has told me ' you open an .mxd, find your .mdb and open it like a normal shapefile', but hasn't given me more info and there is a language and timezone difference which makes it difficult to get more info. He seems to think opening it as a totally simple task, so I think I could be missing something basic.

I have tried making a connection to the database using 'New OLE db connection' in ArcGIS Pro 2.8. Doing this I can open the tables, but have no idea how to extract the geometry from them.

I'm hoping to use this data for my dissertation, so would be hugely grateful for any help at all!

Re: Help extracting 'Blob' geometry from Access DB

JohannesLindner — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 10:09:08 GMT

Hi, welcome to the ESRI community!

ArcGIS Pro can't open Personal Geodatabases (mdb, based on Access) anymore. You need to open the database in ArcMap and convert it to a file geodatabase to use it in ArcGIS Pro.

Take a look at this video: Converting MDB personal Geodatabases for ArcGIS Pro - YouTube

Re: Help extracting 'Blob' geometry from Access DB

JohannesLindner — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 10:11:48 GMT

Moved the question to a more appropriate board.