Enable ArcGIS Pro to access ESRI Personal Geodatabases

DavidWheelock

Please enable ArcGIS Pro to use the ESRI Personal Geodatabase. PGD's are compact, efficient, and an ESRI standard. PGD's offer easy, built-in interoperability, and table data in a PGD can be easily accessed from any MS Office program or any other program able to read a MS Access database. It does all of this in a single, compact file, without the overhead of an enterprise or workgroup geodatabase which require a database server and without the clutter of a file geodatabase. FYI, we do have an enterprise geodatabase for when we need that.

It's deeply troubling that ESRI has chosen to deny its loyal, long-time customers the ability even to read their data in an ESRI standard format, the Personal Geodatabase.

No, a File Geodatabase is not a suitable alternative or replacement. A FGD is a silo and cuts the data off from most other programs. It isolates the data and can only be accessed from ESRI programs or GIS programs that have access to it and cannot be read at all by office productivity software or any other database software. It's not useful to me.

ESRI's explanation in the ArcGIS Pro docs:

http://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/tool-reference/tool-errors-and-warnings/001001-010000/tool-errors-a...

ESRI states that "Personal geodatabases do not scale well in the 64-bit environment" and will not be supported. It recommends a FGD.

My response to ESRI:

Please let me and your other users be the judge of whether a personal geodatabase suits our needs. We can decide for ourselves when we need to scale to a more robust GDB format. Permanently terminating our ability to use the PGD is not a useful solution for me. Again, a FGD is not a suitable replacement for the reasons cited above.

DeborahHuber · ‎03-02-2018

Whoa! This just ruined my day. We have a client that has 3 end-users for the PDGB we delivered to them last year - 2 of those being non-GIS users that use the Access interface to edit attribution and pull customized reports. It took four years of field work and data development to create - and now I am learning that it will not be accessible or maintainable in Pro?!? Is ESRI planning to address this issue? For now, I can use Desktop 10.6, but for how long? There are rumours that Desktop will eventually fall off, so what then? Will my client no longer be able to use the product we delivered? They use a viewer for seeing the spatial components - and when that needs to be updated, they can hire us on an hourly basis to make spatial edits and mass data updates thru the join feature. Not having the Access interface will make this operation untenable. How would we help future clients with a similar structure/usage?

DavidWheelock · ‎03-05-2018

Thanks for this important use-case, Deborah. I, too, have been a user of the PGDB at my old employer, and my new employer also uses PGDB alongside SDE for many things. Stopping cold-turkey would be a major issue.

ESRI has been trying to kill the PGDB for several years now for the reasons they outline in the link I provided in my original idea above.

However, you can still connect to a PGDB in Pro, if you're willing to shell out $2500 for the Data Interoperability Extension. So, ESRI HAS developed the ability to connect Pro to a PGDB and you can get it. They're just not going to give it to you for free because they're trying to get you to stop using it.

Long story short, if we put enough pressure on them here, they might just put it into the main Pro product.

DavidWheelock · ‎03-08-2018

Thanks, Ted.

Anonymous User · ‎06-21-2018

David, my biggest issue isn't so much that "Pro can't read the pGDB" - I could theoretically convert all that data into a FGDB before losing Desktop altogether - but this would not solve my current problem.

Two* of my end-users of that database are Access users - they do not have any ESRI products, yet they can view, edit and save the data in Access. The 3rd end-user (in another office) DOES have ESRI products and CAN view the spatial data. Note that the spatial data may require an edit rarely - as neighborhoods are built/renovated/demolished - while the tabular data is edited daily as the residents move in and out of them.

*When I refer to the "two end users" - I am referring to the Facilities Maintenance team and the Marketing Management team - each made up of dozens of personnel. To ask a single GIS person - to enter the day-to-day edits of ALL THAT STAFF, is completely unrealistic.

I'm open to another solution from ESRI - it doesn't necessarily HAVE to be an Access-faced database, but SOMETHING that a non-ESRI-product-owning client can use WHILE IT IS STILL also a GIS database - i.e. the data storage device needs to be editable/accessible/view-able in both spatial format AND tabular format by both ESRI product owners and non-ESRI product owners.

If my clients are forced to own ESRI software to work with my data, then they will chose a different solution and cut ESRI out completely - and I will lose work.

DavidWheelock · ‎06-21-2018

If you just want something that users can read and you can use at your license level, then you might consider the ESRI Workgroup geodatabase. It requires a lot more effort, administrative overhead and technical knowledge than the Access-based Personal Geodatabase, which requires no overhead, at all. However, your users could connect using office products and ODBC and it's a no-extra-cost entry level of SDE geodatabase.

Create a desktop or workgroup geodatabase—Help | ArcGIS Desktop

Google Search:

https://www.google.com/search?q=workgroup+geodatabase+licensing&ie=&oe=

TedKowal · ‎06-22-2018

I have tried this .... and the requirement for editing and updating overwrites and recreates the table every time you want to edit. For example, in a signs table, I want to move one sign... I would have to overwrite the complete table to update. (Again this could be a user set up issue Me)... but that's what I have found trying to update a SQL Server and or SQL Sever Light DB with the product using standard license.... That is unworkable.

DavidWheelock · ‎06-22-2018

Thanks Ted. That really demonstrates why the beauty and simplicity and interoperability of the Personal Geodatabase for small-scale data management and transfer should not just be tossed out with the trash by ESRI.

MattWilkie3 · ‎07-09-2018

Very clearly described. Thanks.

JackHurlbut · ‎07-20-2018

I would say it's limited on the ESRI SQL side not the Access SQL side.

ChaimSchwartz3 · ‎07-23-2018

Are you saying that the ESRI workgroup geodatabase (SQL server express) is supported in ArcGIS Pro? I'm pretty sure it's not, or at least it was not one year ago when I looked into this.