[gis_info] Know Your Geodatabase: A Reusable ArcPy Inspection Script

[Eric Pimpler]

You’ve been here before. A vendor delivers a file geodatabase as part of a
contracted project and you need to verify what they built before signing
off. Your predecessor leaves the agency and you inherit an enterprise
geodatabase connection and a folder of half-documented projects. Another
department hands off a dataset for an upcoming data-sharing agreement, or
your manager asks for an inventory of the GIS holdings for an open data
initiative. The first question is always the same: what’s in this thing?

For ten feature classes, clicking through the Catalog pane is fine. For a
hundred, it’s tedious. For an enterprise geodatabase with feature datasets,
subtypes, domains, and relationship classes, manual inspection stops being
a reasonable use of your time. And once you’ve inspected it, you have
nothing to share with your team, nothing to attach to a project record, and
nothing to compare against next quarter when you suspect something has
changed.

This article walks through a reusable (and downloadable) ArcPy script that
produces a complete inventory of any geodatabase: workspace metadata,
feature datasets and their spatial references, every feature class and
table with record counts, fields with their types and properties, domains,
subtypes, and relationship classes. The output goes to the console and a
CSV (or Markdown) report you can drop straight into agency documentation.

I’ll build it up one layer at a time, explaining the choices along the way,
then present the consolidated script at the end. The goal is for you to
understand each piece well enough to adapt it — most working GIS analysts
end up with their own version of this utility eventually, and you might as
well start from a good base.

Read the entire article.
<https://geospatialtraining.com/know-your-geodatabase-a-reusable-arcpy-inspection-script/>

-- 
Eric Pimpler
President/Owner
Geospatial Training Services
215 W Bandera #114-104
Boerne, TX 78006
http://geospatialtraining.com
Twitter - @gistraining
Instagram - @eric_pimpler
YouTube <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBsovhqqh9xWnuTESkQdtkg>
eric at geospatialtraining.com
210-260-4992
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