Title: “Migrating ArcInfo Librarian Data to ArcSDE”

Panelists:         
Josh Lieberman, Director of Data Services, Syncline, Inc.
Glenn Hazelton, MIS Manager & Database Administrator, MWRA
Michael Trust, Senior GIS Database Administrator, MassGIS

For the past several years, MassGIS (the Commonwealth’s Office of Geographic and Environmental Information) and MWRA (Massachusetts Water Resources Authority) have maintained geographic data in ESRI’s ArcInfo coverage Librarian format.  As these organizations began to adopt the new ArcGIS 8.1 and ArcIMS technologies, which do not support libraries, they began to investigate alternative methods of porting their tiled data into the geodatabase format and then managing it in the new environment.  This panel discussion will focus on the data migration strategies utilized by both organizations and the issues that arose during the process.  Topics will include:

• The loading method – automated command line SDE vs. ArcCatalog
• Input data format - ArcSDE for Coverages vs. Shapefiles vs. converting Libraries to single coverages
• User access - Setting up roles and user accounts
• Naming conventions & re-organizing new layers in feature datasets
• Grid size and database tuning (SDE vs Oracle Spatial)
• Cleaning up tile boundaries
• Raster data in the geodatabase
• Importing and maintaining metadata
• Dealing with ArcInfo Annotation classes
• Joins vs. relates to remote databases
• Projections - ArcView engine vs. ArcToolbox
• Conversion of a table with X,Y coordinates into an SDE layer
• Exporting SDE layers for distribution