Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 5. Programming Geodatabases
During the course of this topic, you have learned about the key tools to author, manage, and
administer ArcGIS geodatabases. You have learned how to create a geodatabase, add data-
sets, create relationships, and much more. In the previous chapter, you learned some tech-
niques that can be applied to the geodatabase to optimize and keep your geodatabase
healthy. You might have noticed that running all these tools manually, especially in bulk
mode, can be a hectic process. That is why Esri, the company that created ArcGIS, has
made all these geodatabase functionalities available as geoprocessing tools. These tools can
be combined and joined together to form other tools with different functionalities. They can
also be called from various programming platforms such as Python to solve interesting
problems, as we will see later in this chapter.
Note
A geoprocessing tool is a component that accepts input parameters and produces an output
by performing operations on a geodatabase.
Python is a high-level programming language used for many applications. The simplicity,
open source standard, and object-oriented architecture of the language is what makes it
popular.
We will discuss two methods for programming geodatabases; the first one is Python script-
ing, which is considered the pillar scripting language for ArcGIS, and the second one is
model builder, which is a very effective way to build models from existing geoprocessing
tools.
Note
Model builder is a feature built on top of ArcGIS, which allows the user to combine mul-
tiple geoprocessing tools into a single logical model to perform a complicated task easily.
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