From the course: ArcGIS Pro Essential Training

Creating data connections - ArcGIS Tutorial

From the course: ArcGIS Pro Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Creating data connections

“

- [Instructor] We use the catalog pane a lot, especially when we want to connect to data or maps. In case you lose the catalog pane it's good to know how to reopen it. So if we close catalog, we want to view it again just go to the view ribbon and pick on catalog pane and it should appear. So now that we're there, let's look at connecting to data. We need to be able to connect to data such as files, geodatabases, databases. Well first let's talk about databases. We have filed geo databases. They are basically a folder with a set of feature classes inside of it. The folder's name is actually .gdb on it, and that's what that is. Now we can connect to a new one. We could create a brand new one, or we can make a new file geodatabase. We can make a new mobile database, or we can make a new database connection. Now the database connections, we have several that we can choose from. We can choose from BigQuery, DB2, so on, Redshift, Teradata, even Snowflake. SQL Server's the one I use a lot of, same with Oracle and PostgreSQL. So these are all the different common databases we can connect to. They're Enterprise, so depending on what you pick, so if you pick on SQL Server you'd have to put in the instance to the SQL Server. And you could use the authorization through a username password or use your Windows and so on, then you could pick the database. But these are all Enterprise connections, so we're not going to do that today. We're going to leave the Enterprise connections alone, and we're not going to create a brand new geodatabase either. What we're going to do is we're going to connect to a directory full of files, and those files are on our desktop in the Exercise Files. So what we're going to do is pick on folders, right click and add folder connection. We're going to go to our desktop, so let's go to our desktop. And you should see on the desktop a folder called Exercise Files. And in there we're going to pick DATA and click OK. So now we have a data connection to a folder called DATA, so there's the folder shortcut. So it's just shortcut to that directory of data. Now we already have a MyProject folder, which is you could see it's under Users. I'll hold my cursor there so you can see. Users, Gordon-LinkedIn, Documents, ArcGIS, Projects. But if I hover over data, you could see that's actually on my desktop under Exercise Files. And then you could see underneath that we've got CSV files, LIDAR, RASTER, SHP files, and a file geodatabase all under that data folder. So by connecting this data folder to my MyProject ArcGIS Pro project, I have access to all this data that was sitting in a folder that I didn't have access to. Now, of course, I could drag and drop data in, but by adding this to my catalog, by having a folder connection, every time I open up this project I now have access to that data that's stored in that Exercise Files that I downloaded from the LinkedIn learning site.

Contents