Organizing your data into a geodatabase

Before creating a geodatabase, you'll want to spend some time designing it—its structure, the data that it will include, and how different types of relationships among features and attributes will be supported. For a personal geodatabase, the design time may be relatively short. For an enterprise geodatabase, creating an efficient design may take weeks.

Database design resources

Database design is an entire subject unto itself and beyond the scope of this course. Below are some resources you may find helpful:

· A good starting point for designing your geodatabase is to review others' designs. ESRI has published generic template geodatabase models for a variety of applications. These data models are available from the ESRI Web site.

A portion of the electric distribution data model available from the ESRI Web site.

· The ArcGIS Desktop Help (Contents tab -> Building a geodatabase) has detailed information on designing geodatabases.

You'll learn about topological relationships, subtypes, attribute domains, and relationship classes in the weeks to come. All of these need to be planned for when designing your geodatabase. Once you have a solid design, you're ready to go ahead and set up the geodatabase.

For this week, you'll get hands-on experience with the basics of setting up a geodatabase. You'll learn how to use ArcCatalog to create a personal geodatabase, build its structure, and add data to it.