Stage 4: Geodatabase creation and set up

The geodatabase is created to reflect the relationships that exist between the various feature classes and tables within the feature data set as described previously. Once this important step has been executed information can be imported into the Geodatabase.

For coordinate system information, UTM Zone 10 NAD 83 is imported from existing coverage projection information. For spatial reference extent, the XMIN, YMIN, XMAX and YMAX values are determined by arbitrarily drawing a boundary box and finding the corresponding UTM values which are shown in the diagram. This arbitrarily boundary box is buffered beyond the cadastre actual extent. It was found that this spatial reference extent must be keyed in or else default values will be used that are not within any of extent of the data layers.

The actual data in these layers/tables can be loaded before or after schema is created. It was found that attribute tables were better loaded before creating schema (into an empty geodatabase) because values can only be added manually or through ArcObject scripts to the established empty attribute table (in a similar maaner to the relationship class tables). Feature class layers can be loaded to the geodatabase before or after applying Case Tools schema. Both ways can be loaded using Simple Data Loader in ArcCatalog (while the Data Loader in ArcMap can be used only afterwards). Simple Data Loader only loads data without behaviour or relationship classes which can be accomplished if loading data before creation of geodatabase schema using CASE Tools. Since the proper method described by ESRI to load data is after the creation of geodatabase schema, the Data Loader in ArcMap was used.

Stage 5: Database Testing

The relationships established in the data model are tested for functionality. Then the personal geodatabase is converted to ArcSDE spatial database for testing simply by copying and pasting data and relationship files in geodatabase to ArcSDE.