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What is the recommended file format for ArcGIS?


sigtill
Contributor
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Skipping Shape and FileGDB. And skipping databases. What is the best / most feature rich file format to open in ArcGIS ? GeoPackage? SQLITE?

13 replies

lars_de_vries
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I think it is hard to answer this question. Do you want to be able to open the data in ArcGIS Desktop/Pro or is it just about storing the data?

I could say Personal Geodatabase, but it is a database as well. And I don't think you can directly Read a EsriJSON file in Desktop or Pro. So what do you want to do with it?


sigtill
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  • June 13, 2018
lars_de_vries wrote:

I think it is hard to answer this question. Do you want to be able to open the data in ArcGIS Desktop/Pro or is it just about storing the data?

I could say Personal Geodatabase, but it is a database as well. And I don't think you can directly Read a EsriJSON file in Desktop or Pro. So what do you want to do with it?

Non-esri format prefered. To be used for read only.

  • June 13, 2018

To my knowledge ArcGIS does not distinguish between SQLITE or GeoPackage, they are just different schemas and ways of storing geometries in a SQLite-db and apparently cross-functional for some time.

desktop.arcgis.com/en/arcmap/10.3/manage-data/databases/sqlite-and-arcgis.htm#

http://isticktoit.net/?p=1832


david_r
Evangelist
  • June 13, 2018

You're constraining yourself a lot here... I would probably go for GeoPackage, since it seems to have a promising future, which ESRI seems to want to be a part of:

http://www.esri.com/esri-news/releases/14-2qtr/esri-supports-ogc-geopackage-encoding-standard


lars_de_vries
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A weird alternative, and maybe not to data-rich, could be DWG. But all is depending on the data you wish to store.


david_r
Evangelist
  • June 13, 2018

Oh, and if it's rasters you need: NetCDF is hard to beat in terms of features.


sigtill
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  • June 13, 2018
david_r wrote:

You're constraining yourself a lot here... I would probably go for GeoPackage, since it seems to have a promising future, which ESRI seems to want to be a part of:

http://www.esri.com/esri-news/releases/14-2qtr/esri-supports-ogc-geopackage-encoding-standard

Yes, this feels like the best open format to work with - and its also great in QGIS. I`ll try to go this path and see the clients feedback. The reasons I want to move away from FileGDB and ESRI-formats is due to them being more closed than GeoPackage and SQLite.

 

 


sigtill
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  • June 13, 2018
lars_de_vries wrote:

A weird alternative, and maybe not to data-rich, could be DWG. But all is depending on the data you wish to store.

Yep, thats an alternative - however its quite "old" and it might be issues with attributes.

 

 


sigtill
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  • June 13, 2018
david_r wrote:

Oh, and if it's rasters you need: NetCDF is hard to beat in terms of features.

Thanks, It seems NetCDF 4 is not supported in FME. I`ll try to use the GeoPackage Raster to see how the performance is. I guess a regular JPEG-compressed GeoTIFF might also do the trick.

 

 


lars_de_vries
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sigtill wrote:
Yep, thats an alternative - however its quite "old" and it might be issues with attributes.

 

 

If you van add blocks, preferably from a template, you have quite some possibilities.

 

And you didn't say it needed to be new... ;-)

david_r
Evangelist
  • June 14, 2018
sigtill wrote:
Thanks, It seems NetCDF 4 is not supported in FME. I`ll try to use the GeoPackage Raster to see how the performance is. I guess a regular JPEG-compressed GeoTIFF might also do the trick.

 

 

NetCDF 4 is actually supported starting with FME 2018.

sigtill
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  • June 14, 2018
david_r wrote:
NetCDF 4 is actually supported starting with FME 2018.
Thx, didn't know that!

 

 


sigtill
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  • June 14, 2018
lars_de_vries wrote:
If you van add blocks, preferably from a template, you have quite some possibilities.

 

And you didn't say it needed to be new... ;-)
True, blame the guy making the specifications, me :)

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