Blog discussion - Migrating from Personal GDB's to...

[ElaineEvans]

The first of a series of blogs was released to discuss why personal geodatabases are not supported within ArcGIS Pro.   Additional blogs within this series have also been released and further explore options such as:

• Using OLE DB to establish a read-only connection from ArcGIS Pro to your personal geodatabase.
• Table comparing the differences between file-based geodatabases (mobile, file, and personal geodatabases)
• Migrating data from a personal geodatabase to a file geodatabase.
• Migrating data from a file geodatabase to a mobile geodatabase.

An additional blog will be released soon within this series and will further explore:

• Reporting options available to use with your mobile geodatabase.

This discussion is for questions that are directly related to content/concepts included in these specific blogs: 

• 1st Blog - It's Not Personal, It's Mobile: A quick history of the geodatabase and why personal geoda...
• 2nd Blog - Bridging Data: Create and use OLE DB connections in ArcGIS Pro
• 3rd Blog - Migrating Data: Tools to migrate a personal geodatabase to a file or mobile geodatabase

[Anonymous User]

@ElaineEvans - This is a great topic, and I'd love to read the blog! I seem to be having trouble locating it. Would you be able to link the blog article in this post?

Thanks,

Mike

[ElaineEvans]

Hey @Anonymous User, thanks for your comment. I've added the link to the blog article above and hope you enjoy reading it!

Thanks,

Elaine Evans

[StevenDel_Favero]

The main advantage of the Personal GDB was the ability to query and edit the data in Microsoft Access. This is not an inherent ability for Mobile Geodatabases and ArcGIS is not at all adequate for working with complex relational data. The ability to open a SQLite database in MS Access requires a third party ODBC driver. As a government employee, I do not have the luxury of installing such a driver on my machine, let alone having this driver installed on the Remote Desktop server where my agency does all of its work. Getting approval to have something like this installled may never be possible or will take a very long time (I am starting to petition for it). Is it possible to have this ODBC Driver installed along with ArcGIS Pro in future releases? Otherwise a Mobile Geodatabase does not have much value and is not a valid alternative to a Personal GDB. Not being able to use a Personal GDB in ArcGIS Pro is therefore a serious impediment to my workflow and Esri has still not provided an alternative for me. 

[Bud]

Feel free to comment or upvote: 

Idea: Install ODBC/SQLite driver by default in Pro to allow viewing/editing complex Mobile GDB relational ...

[StevenDel_Favero]

This entire article is a misleading lie. I have been testing out reading Mobile Geodatabases in MS Access. They are in no way whatsoever an alternative to a Personal Geodatabase. Even with a third party driver that allows one to read a MobileGDB in MS Access, it is barely functional. This is because all Text fields in an Esri Mobile GDB are created as 'Long Text' fields in SQLite, which makes them unusable in queries in MS Access. Also Date fields in an Esri Mobile GDB are a custom field type and cannot be translated in MS Access. These issues make a Mobile Geodatabase unusable in MS Access.

[AZendel]

I ran into the exact same issues. Access won't support joins on "long text"/"memo" fields. I used to update attributes of feature classes (i.e., a shape field was present) very frequently. That is hard (maybe impossible?) to do in Access/ODBC because the libraries to handle geometries are not installed. It's probably moot to be spending more time on typing this. I think it's pretty clear that this ship has sailed......

I've been using "Personal ArcSDE" on SQL express for SQL access to my data. It helps alleviate a lot of this pain, but it's not perfect. And AFAIK, you still cant create a new geodatabase in this environment in Pro. You must use ArcCatalog. It's free (at least for now while it's available), but you're limited to 5 read connections and 1 edit connection. That makes it hard to run geoprocessing models and examine the output at the same time. 

[curtvprice]

Elaine, thank you and you collaborators for a very useful set of articles. My Federal agency is losing ArcMap in February and these workarounds could save some data that would have been lost, so thank you! 

Note, we can still read coverages in Pro from Python and I wrote a Pro python script to convert them to gdb, and even one that can upgrade file naming in pre-7.0 coverages so Pro's geoprocessing tools can read them.

Read access to old formats is so important!

[ElaineEvans]

Good afternoon @curtvprice, 

I'm so happy to hear that you've found this blog series to be very useful!   I wanted to share that if you don't have an ArcMap license to run the Migrate from personal geodatabase to file geodatabase sample tool, please consider using the ArcGIS Data Interoperability extension to migrate personal geodatabases to file geodatabases.

I've updated the FAQ section of this Migrating Data blog to reflect this information.

[xingchenc]

@ElaineEvans 

While having a tool inside the Data Interoprability Extention is great, it doesn't make any sense to the end user to pay extra money on the extension license only to get mdb converted into gdb. This function should be included in the arcgis pro license.