Personnel Geodatabase and a File Geodatabase, Essay Example

What’s the difference between a Personnel Geodatabase and a File Geodatabase? There are several differences between PGDB and FGDB. PGDB is contained within the database of Microsoft Access which is .mdb and is used for all ArcGIS licenses. It is appropriate for small groups and individual use. Personal Geodatabase is limited to 2GB of storage. Therefore, “the performance can worsen when several readers are using files that exceed 250 MB”. (Washington Post, p. 3) One of the advantages of PGDB is that the tables of database can be opened in Access for the purpose of editing. This makes Access a very practical attribute manager.

File Geodatabase is nowadays a recommended format for ArcGIS by ESRI. It’s a new version 9.2. it is used to save geographic data in a folder on a disk drive. FGDB is usually presented as a file folder and is not attached to management system relational database. The size limit in FGDB is greater than PGDB and makes 1 terabyte per dataset. Commonly used for small groups or various data editors, FGDB is effective as long as the editors are working in separate databases, feature classes, etc. FGDB provides a fast performance because it takes 1/3 of storage space necessary for PGDB. Advantage is also that “individual classes can go up to 500 GB” (New York Times, p. 4) and have a good performance. But still big datasets used by many users can bring to degradations in the general performance.

What’s the difference between a Feature Datasets and Feature Classes? A set of geographic features that allocate the same geometry type and attribute field of a common area is called a feature class. Examples of feature class are parcels, streets, etc. and they usually are organized together with a feature dataset.  By storing feature class in a feature dataset we participate in a topology to maintain their common geometry, which is a network to manage the connectivity and organize network analysis.

Works Cited

Douglas, Susan. “In-depth database”. Washington Post. 10 December 2009: A8

Thompson, Mark. “The power of rhythm.” New York Times. 5 May 2003, p.4