ARCHIVED: What are the advantages of file geodatabases?

The file geodatabase is a new geodatabase type released in ArcGIS 9.2. This type of geodatabase provides a widely available, simple, and scalable geodatabase solution for all users. File geodatabases work across operating systems.

File geodatabases offer many advantages over shapefiles and personal geodatabases for Access, such as:

• The file geodatabase uses an efficient data structure that is optimized for performance and storage. File geodatabases use about one-third of the feature geometry storage required by shapefiles and personal geodatabases for Access. File geodatabases also allow you to compress vector data to a read-only format to reduce storage requirements even further.
• File geodatabases have no storage size limit. Individual datasets within a file geodatabase, such as a feature class or table, have a size limit of 1 TB.
• The file geodatabase offers improved performance. For example, it can easily support individual datasets containing over 300 million features and datasets that can scale beyond 500 GB per file, while maintaining very fast performance.
• The file geodatabase offers less restrictive editing locks. Locking can be done per table instead of on the entire database.
• The file geodatabase is supported by many platforms, including Windows and Unix (Solaris and Linux).

File geodatabase size and name limits are as follows:

• File geodatabase size: No limit
• Table or feature class size: 1 TB (default), 4 GB to 256 TB (depending on storage format)
• Number of feature classes and tables: 2,147,483,647
• Number of fields in a feature class or table: 65,534
• Number of rows in a feature class or table: 4,294,967,295
• Geodatabase name length: Number of characters the operating system allows in a folder name
• Feature class or table name length: 160 characters
• Field name length: 64 characters
• Text field width: 2,147,483,647

For more, see ESRI's Geodatabase Overview.