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.
