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.

Robert_LeClair · ‎07-18-2019

Joabel - in ArcGIS Pro there is no conversion tool to go from a Microsoft Access Personal Geodatabase to a File Geodatabase. One way to do so in ArcCatalog, right click to create a new file geodatabase in the same folder as your *.mdb geodatabase. Then copy/paste or drag/drop the feature classes, feature datasets, tables, raster etc. from the *.mdb to the *.gdb. Start ArcGIS Pro and start using the data in your newly created/transferred file geodatabase.

JoabelBarbieri · ‎07-19-2019

It would work if I still had ArcCatalog and ArcMap. Only on PRO now !

I was hoping the only software I wasd going to need is PRO but it seems like I need to reinstall ArcMap. What a bummer ESRI!

ErikLash1 · ‎07-24-2019

This may or may not be helpful but if you can still access the older 32 bit Python environment from arcgis desktop you can script it without having to use a gui. Not sure if this can be done with engine or runtime or if there is a way to simply add in the esri components or not.

Also, if you can spin up a VM and install the 32 bit desktop on that, it might be the way to go. Give your VM access to the location where you store the pGDB and run the transition. Can get an Edge VM image from Microsoft for free. All you need is the ESRI software and a VM host.

ErikLash1 · ‎07-24-2019

I get that the ESRI message is "we don't want you using MS Access", but it's really the best software out there for the desktop user, far better than a File Geodatabase primarily because fGDB is closed source. Ever try running strict SQL on an fGDB? Well, I do it, through the github gdBee project. Life saver that project is.

Microsoft is revamping their OLEDB commitments. Maybe ESRI should follow suit. The need is there and so it was undeprecated in 2017. Plus ODBC to MS Office is always possible.

More appropriately, maybe ESRI should release a proper ODBC driver for its file Geodatabase. All of this fury would dissapate quickly if we could work with the fGDB like we work with SQLite or MS Access. We need a regular, non-catalog, way to access the file geodatabase contents for both data entry and data manipulation.

ESRI offers full access to data contained in Excel. Easy extension to put it back in Access. Any refusal to do so is not because it's not possible. It's purely a business decision.

Please hear what we are saying ESRI. Thanks.

DavidWheelock · ‎07-25-2019

So, Erik, are you saying that Microsoft DID release 64-bit OLE and ODBC drivers for the MDB format, subsequent to the 2010 announcement that's cited above?

JoshuaBixby · ‎07-25-2019

Erik, I don't disagree with much of what you are saying. I have always been critical of how Esri "opened up" its file geodatabase. It is ironic that Esri advertises (Open Standards | Supporting Your Data Formats, Metadata & Services Standards ) "a long-standing commitment to standards and interoperatbility," and yet they release the FGDB in the least open way. Esri should have released the specification for the file geodatabase, not a crippled API.

Given the growth in size of geospatial data sets, the fundamental limitations of the Access database (especially size), and the performance issues that the geodatabase model ran into with Access; I am surprised Esri has supported the personal geodatabase this long. That said, there really isn't a reason Esri can't support a proper connection to Access databases, even if the connections don't support native spatial data use/management.

DavidWheelock · ‎09-04-2019

So, I searched Google for "64-bit drivers ms Access 2003" and look what I found, someone who's trying to develop an ArcGIS Pro add-in to enable it to connect to an ESRI personal geodatabase.

Here's the link to the conversation.

Using 32-bit MS Access (2003) mdb in a 64-bit application

TedKowal · ‎09-04-2019

Using this "Unsupport" method you can actually run the 32 bit and 64 bit side by side. For me it has been working well.

How to install 64-bit Microsoft Database Drivers alongside 32-bit Microsoft Office | Search | Autode...

ColeAndrews · ‎12-09-2019

He must not be a GIS person..."a product called esri ArcPro"

LonSharp · ‎01-09-2020

At the very least ESRI needs to offer some kind of batch geoprocessing conversion tool to move from Personal to File geodatabase.

Currently the only method is to use ArcCatalog to create a new FGDB, then copy/paste the contents from the old PGDB.

Sure, it works, but I have inherited well over 1,500 different Personal Geodatabases. Manually creating then copy/pasting data 1 by 1 is an absurd solution. Particularly since it was ESRI that was pushing us to the personal geodatabase over shapefiles in the first place, way-back-when.