What is the best way to convert a Stata file into a geodatabase? I have many fields, 400-500, the Stata file. I have Stat Transfer and I usually transfer from Stata to .dbf but when there's this many fields it will not work.
In addition if some of the Stata fields begin with underscores, at what point and in what software can I change these? I'm assuming FGDB does not like field names that start with underscores.
Most pre-10 ArcSDE database limit the column count to 256, but at 10.0 the ArcSDE limit was increased to 500 (SE_MAX_COLUMNS). The FGDB limit is 64K fields, but I believe they must start with a character ([A-Z](A-Z0-9_)* - SQL requirement). You're probably going to have to code this from scratch, so it doesn't really matter where you make the change. The fastest approach would use C++ (either ArcObjects or FileGDB API), but if you don't have a lot of rows, C# or Python won't slow you down too much. What interface do you have at the Stata end for accessing raw data? Or would you plan to use ASCII for interchange? - V
