Advice on building a geodatabase from a Microsoft Access database

[KarlZimmer]

Hello all,

I have a few Microsoft Access databases that I would like to convert to geodatabases or at least include some spatial components; however, I have little experience with geodatabases.  Currently, my Microsoft Access database is organzied into several heirarchial tables that are connected through relationships in Access. Example table structure and relationships are shown in the attached photo:


This structure works fine for organizing and managing non-spatial attribute data, but now I'm hoping to integrate a spatial component for the conservation site, sample site, and plot paramters . For example, I have a Conservation Site polygon feature class, a sample site polygon feature class, and a plot point feature class. No spatial components are required for the ground, tree, and shrub subtables, but these tables may have further lookup tables associated with them.  My question is can I integrate these 3 feature classes into this structure and if so how do I go about doing this?  In the end I would like to be able to view the points or polygons in ArcGIS and see the underlying attributes of all the subplot tables in ArcGIS, but still be able to edit and append attribute data though a Microsoft Access form and create Microsoft Access reports using the attribute data. Addtionally, in the future I'll need to add additional conservation sites, sample sites, and plots so please keep this as a consideration as well.

Any input, advice, or links to further information on this topic would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Cheers,
Karl

[GregoryRoss]

I do this all the time. You will want to look at creating a personal geodatabase. There is a great tutorial here: http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#//00v20000000t000000.htm

A couple of things you will want to note:

1. I believe that ESRI personal geodatabases are created as .mdb files and NOT .accdb files. This will limit your ability to use the latest and greatest features of Access 2007/2010. This may no longer be true as it was in the past.

2. These personal geodatabases will have special ESRI tables in them that you will not want to mess with. You will also want to limit editing the design of certain fields in the spatial feature class tables.

Just be aware of what you are editing and you will not have any problems. Good luck.

[KarlZimmer]

Thanks for the reply.  The link to the tutorial definately helped.

One question that has arrose is whether you can have a domain with mulitple descriptions. For my database I want to assign names of shrubs as a domain but want the description to have both common and scientific names in addition to the shrub code. So my table in Acccess has 3 columns, ShrubIDcode, Common_Name, Sci_Name is it possible to have it so I can have the both the common and sci_name fields in the description for the domain without having to combine them to one field.

Thanks.
Karl