Why is my arcmap crashing when using the extract values to points tool?

[SuzanneMilner]

Hi, my ARCMAP keeps crashing everytime I try to use the extract values to points tool using my dataset. I need both options ticked (interpolate values at the point and append all the input raster attributes to the output point features) as I need the HWSD data for each of the points in the points layer. It has worked previously with another set of points over the UK but when I try to extract to points over Poland it crashes and when I've tried to do the UK points again it also crashes. It even crashes with a set of Poland points that is only 20 points. The values I'm trying to extract are from the HWSD. I have the raster of the soils, joined with the HWSD_DATA database. I'm using ArcMap 10.5 on a Windows 10 64bit system with 16GB RAM and >150GB hard drive space available.

The steps I'm using are:

Open ArcCatalog

Click customize>customise mode>in commands tab find “Add OLE DB connection” and drag to top toolbar

Click on new “Add OLE DB connection” button on toolbar

Click on “Microsoft Jet 4.0 OLE DB provider>click next>in the select database name click on the … button and navigate to the HWSD.mdb file (available for download from HWSD website)> click ok

Open ArcMap

Add HWSD.bil raster layer (File>add data> add data> navigate to HWSD.bil)

Right click on raster layer> joins and relates>Join

For 1. select Value, for 2. navigate to your database connections (towards the bottom) and select the connection you made in ArcCatalog>select HWSD_DATA and click add>for 3 select MU_global>click ok

Right click on the raster layer and open attributes table> check all of the other columns have now been added to the raster layer e.g. Ref Depth, Drainage etc

File> add data> add data>navigate to Poland centroid points shape file

Click Extract Values to Points and select the centroid points as input point features and the HWSD.bil as the input raster, selecting both tick box options.

When it crashes I get a request to send ESRI an error report but I dont get any reply and it closes ArcMap before I get any notification telling me what the error is.

Does anyone have any idea why it's crashing? Is it a memory issue? If so, how can I increase my memory allowance? I've read a few discussions on here that suggests ARCGIS is limited to only use 4GB RAM even though I have 16GB available but these were old discussions about ARCMAP10.1 and older.

The HSWD can be downloaded from IIASA - Land Use Change and Agriculture Program  and I've attached the files for one of my points data sets.

[DanPatterson_Retired]

are the files in the same coordinate system?

[SuzanneMilner]

Yes, they're all in GCS_WGS_1984

[DanPatterson_Retired]

To avoid having to do a bits and pieces download Suzanne, perhaps you can zip all the parts of the shapefile into one zip file

[SuzanneMilner]

I've updated the attachments to be just 2 zip folders, one containing the HWSD raster and database and the other is the points shape files.

[DanPatterson_Retired]

The bil zip is fine.  The other zip can't be unzipped, there is an error

[SuzanneMilner]

Sorry I should have tested, it should work now

[DanPatterson_Retired]

Well the bil worked until I created pyramids and defined a coordinate system... then everything went sour. (will have to retrace steps)

So I turned my attention to the shapefiles.  Both with a defined coordinate system but for the tiniest part of the world hugely smaller than the *.bil that you want to extract the data from.  The image is big, I don't suppose there is a way of getting the data for a much smaller area.

In any event, I will try the bil again later... at least everything has a defined coordinate system, but I hadn't gotten to the stage of determining the cell size relative to your point spacing.

Yes, arcmap 10.6 even, is limited to max of 4 Gig of memory on a perfect day.  I suspect it is a data issue, so when I try later I will

• convert the bil to a tif, right away
• define the coordinate system of the tif (GSC WGS84)
• find out what the extent of the point shapefiles and use that as my area of interest to set the Extents in the Analysis Properties
• perhaps to ensure I am not getting some raster size thing, I might set the analysis extents and use Copy raster to get a smaller raster just covering the study area
• compare cell size vs point spacing for both shape files.
• see if extract to points will work then

Or you can try to Suzanne... any joining or peripheral stuff should be done after the fact.

[DanPatterson_Retired]

well convert bil to tif right away... should work without the conversion, but I got fed up waiting.

I just converted to tif, and did a quick Extract Multivalues to point... the extract values to point gave me issues in Pro (too many questions)

some data are in the shapefile tables.  I would recommend you move everything to a geodatabase before doing any extraction.

I will let you decide if everything is ok

Clip the raster before you repeat the process! that is part of the issue besides the format (which is supported, but go figure)

[SuzanneMilner]

Thanks for trying. For me, for some reason, converting the raster to a tiff wasn't working. The reason the raster is the whole world is because I eventually will need to extract soils data from all countries, though I am starting with a few small areas to test. I tried extracting to a rectangle over the area of Poland I needed but this still was causing a crash when I tried extracting values to points.

I have found a work around that worked though. I start as before but instead of joining the raster to the database, I used the extract multi values to points for each of the point data shape files. This added on a "hwsd" column on to the attributes table of each shape file. I think added a join between the shape file and the database as suggested in my original question but insteadt of using the "value" column, it's been named as HWSD. This seems to have worked.

I have no idea why it worked previously using the method I first stated for GBR but now won't when I try it again or when I try it for Poland but using the extract multi values to points then doing the join seems to give the same result.