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ET GeoWizards and Geodatabases

General

ArcGIS supports three types of Geodatabases:

• Personal geodatabase
• SDE
• File geodatabase (ArcGIS 9.2 and above)

In order to avoid some data management problems ET GeoWizards writes its outputs only as stand alone feature classes in Personal Geodatabases (PGDB) and File Geodatabases (FGDB).

Temporary feature classes.

Many of the functions of ET GeoWizards perform complex spatial operations and in the process need to create one or more intermediate datasets. These temporary datasets are not written in the users geodatabase, but in a special geodatabases. ET GeoWizards creates two temporary geodatabases - a PGDB and a FGDB. Depending on the type of the selected output the intermediate feature classes are stored in one of these temporary databases. The temporary databases are stored in a location specified by the user. The location (temp folder) can be set using the ET GeoWizards Main Dialog ==> About Tab ==> Settings). If the temp folder has not be set Et GeoWizards sets it to "c:\temp\ET_Temp"  The names of the temp geodatabases are:

• "et_tempGDB.mdb" - for storing temporary PGDB feature classes.
• "et_tempFDB" - for storing temporary FGDB feature classes.

Note: Since ArcGIS 9.2 cannot create pre-9.2 ("Low" precision) geodatabases (see ArcGIS 9.2 notes topic), the installation of the software contains a template "Low" precision geodatabase. This database is called "et_tempGDB_pre92.mdb". It is copied automatically to the temp folder set by the user. This database is used to store intermediate "Low" precision data if the user selects as an output a "Low" precision database.

Maintenance of the temp geodatabases

All functions are designed to maintain the temporary geodatabases by

• Removing the intermediate feature classes after completion
• Compacting the databases

In some cases however some of the functions cannot delete the intermediate datasets. This might cause  the size of the temporary geodatabases to grow after long use of the software. Large size of the temporary geodatabases might cause decreased performance of some of the functions of ET GeoWizards. The easiest way to avoid such problems is simply to delete the  temporary geodatabases on regular basis.