How to cut overall polygon around point, linear and areal ?

[PierreWeisse]

[h=2]Hello everyone,[INDENT]
     I turn to you because I am facing a big problem (for me anyway).

     I'll try to be simple and concise.

     I have a set of linear and planar point data. In large quantities!,  About thirty. shp sometimes containing up to 250,000 items per table.

     I try to cut a global polygon around this dataset.

     If anyone can help me in my approach. I thank you in advance.      
[/INDENT]

[TimWitt]

Pierre,

you could right click the Clip tool in your Arc Toolbox and then click "Batch" to clip multiple features at once.

Or if you are a little handy with ArcPy, this script can do it for you.

[markdenil]

As I understand it, you have
30 shape files
each contains up to 250,000 points
the points are planer (on a single plane with no elevation differences)
and may be located so as to line up in certain ways.

You want
a single polygon that encompass all the points in all the shape files

Well,
the Minimum Bounding Geometry (Data Management) tool
will generate bounding polygons for features or groups of features.
I suggest you are interested in the Convex Hull option.

You could run Minimum Bounding Geometry with the Convex Hull option
on each shape file and then either Union all the output hulls
or merge all the output hulls and run Minimum Bounding Geometry
on that merged data set.

You may want to set up a python script (or a model-builder model) to
loop through all your 30 inputs and to handle the 30 outputs.
If the shape files have that many features you likely don't want to make
just one honking big merged shapefile of 7,500,000 points (250,000 x 30)
to run the tool on, so working on each input by itself should work better...