A quick tour of managing file and personal geodatabases

Although there is less management involved in the use of a file or personal geodatabase, there are still some processes you perform to maintain them. Some of these processes are needed to maintain performance. Others, such as compressing file geodatabase data, are optional.

The following lists the management tasks you can perform on file and personal geodatabases:

Task	File geodatabase	Personal geodatabase
Compress vector data to a read-only format to reduce storage requirements.	Y	N
Compact geodatabase to tidy up storage of a geodatabase on disk by reordering records and eliminating unused space.	Y	Y
Create attribute indexes to reduce attribute query processing times.	Y	Y
Set the spatial grid index to minimize spatial query processing times.	Y	Y (However, the spatial index grid size can only be set when a feature class is created.)
Upgrade a previous version of a geodatabase.	Y	Y
Rename a geodatabase.	Y	Y
Move a geodatabase.	Y This should be done using ArcGIS.	Y This should be done using ArcGIS but can be done using Windows Explorer.