How to export the 40 million records in a SDC file into shapefile?

[yunkexiang]

Dear All,
I am working on a project where I need to process in postGIS.
In order to do so, I need shapefile as input.
However, what I have at hand are SDC files. So I need to transform the SDC file into shapefiles in order to put the results in postGIS.

But the problem is, the dataset contains 40 million records which is too big to be "save as shapefile" in one time.
What I am doing now is to divide the records in some logical ways (such as select be the STATES) and then once I have the selection, I will create a layer from the selection and then export it into shapefile.

To process 1/50 of the whole dataset takes me 50minutes to select, and another an hour or so to export.
Which is too tedious.

Does anyone know any other approach that can speed up this process?
Will model builder help at all? (I am looking for automatically way of select and export so that I can leave my computer running over night.)
Thanks.

Best

[WillWhite1]

It's a while since I worked with SDC but are they not considered a feature class input into python in much the same way as a geodatabase feature class? If you cant get that to work, it you might want to convert to a file geodatabase first.

[SteveLynch]

also remember that a shapefile has a 2.1GB file size limit which comes into play around 40 million points or when the .dbf has many features

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapefile

[yunkexiang]

Interesting. Will that be 40 million points only or also 40 million polylines?

also remember that a shapefile has a 2.1GB file size limit which comes into play around 40 million points or when the .dbf has many features

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapefile