Geodatabase Designer and ArcGIS Diagrammer

I was able to get out to the 2007 North Carolina ArcGIS (when did it change from ArcInfo?) User’s Group meeting at Carolina Beach this year. First, for those who didn’t attend, here’s the view from my hotel room balcony:

Hee.

Anyway, one of the presentations - Migration from Legacy GIS to Support CMMS and Other Business Systems (Sabin Fannin, Samantha Bartow, Matt Mole) - used a couple of cool tools that I thought I’d highlight. I don’t use ESRI software a whole lot anymore, so it could be everybody knows about these Arcscripts already, but just in case I wasn’t the only one in the dark on these tools, here goes.

The first is Geodatabase Designer. It is “a set of tools to export and import geodatabase schema using XML.” It adds a tool bar to ArcCatalog that lets you export either an entire geodatabase or portions of it (domains, relationships, topologies, etc.) to a XML schema. It similarly lets you import a XML schema to a geodatabase. The install actually includes a video tutorial to get you started.

Which leads to the next tool. ArcGIS Diagrammer is “a productivity tool for GIS professionals to create, edit, or analyze geodatabase schema.” In short, it’s a visual geodatabase design tool modeled after the Visual Studio 2005 interface. It’s clean, simple, intuitive, and probably the best tool I’ve seen to design a geodatabase. There’s a video demonstration of it on YouTube here. The resultant XML can be imported with the Geodatabase Designer.

Note that Geodatabase Designer supports ArcGIS 8.2+, but ArcGIS Diagrammer requires ArcGIS 9.2. After playing around with these two tools, I wouldn’t design a serious geodatabase without them.