Netezza and ArcGIS

If you are using a Netezza data warehouse appliance, you can connect to your database from ArcGIS to perform complex spatial analysis on subsets of your data.

To use ArcGIS with Netezza, you must install a supported version of the Netezza Spatial Cartridge in the database management system, and install and configure the Netezza ODBC driver on the ArcGIS client machine from which you will make a database connection.

Note:

When setting up the ODBC data source name on Windows, be sure to choose the option to Optimize for ASCII character set. When setting up the ODBC data source name on Linux, set the CharacterTranslationOption to latin9 and the UnicodeTranslationOption to utf16.

Working with data

In most cases, you will have very large amounts of data stored in the data warehouse appliance. To perform analyses from ArcGIS, you would use a subset that contains only the data that you are interested in analyzing. You can define that subset in a query layer definition or you can create a database view that returns only the data subset.

If you want to use query layer definitions, create the definition files in ArcMap. Click File > Add Data > Add Query Layer to open the New Query Layer dialog box, connect to your database, then type the SQL statement to define the data subset.

Caution:

Do not drag data directly from your database connection in the Catalog window in ArcMap to the map if you have not already defined a subset of data. Extremely large datasets, as are normally stored in a data warehouse appliance, would take an inordinate amount of time to display on the map.

If you want to use database views, you can use the Create Database View geoprocessing tool or SQL to define the data subsets you want to analyze.

Guidelines for Netezza data used in ArcGIS

The only ArcGIS-specific limitation for using Netezza is that the spatial columns in your tables must be named shape or aliased to shape. The Netezza spatial column uses the VARCHAR data type currently, so the name or alias of the column is the way ArcGIS identifies that it stores spatial data rather than text.

As a Netezza user, you know that Netezza Spatial stores simple data. Therefore, you cannot paste nonsimple data from another database into Netezza.

To help you calculate row sizes, the following table shows the Netezza data types that are created when you create a table or feature class in Netezza from ArcGIS:

ArcGIS field type	Netezza data type created	Disk usage
DATE	timestamp	8 bytes
DOUBLE	numeric(p,s) By default, p (precision) = 38 and s (scale) = 8	Precision of 9 or less = 4 bytes Precision of 10–18 = 8 bytes Precision of 19–38 = 16 bytes
FLOAT	If precision of 6 or less is specified, numeric(p,s) is created. If precision 7–15 is specified, double is created.	numeric = 4 bytes double = 8 bytes
GEOMETRY	Variable length, character varying(up to 64,000)	Point geometries are created as character varying(80). The base size for all other geometries is 64,000 bytes. However, if creating a geometry of this size would cause the total row size to exceed 65,535 bytes, the geometry field will be created with a smaller precision. For example, if the total size of all other fields in the row is 2,000 bytes, the geometry field will be created as character varying(63,535).
GUID	Fixed length character(38)	40 bytes
LONG INTEGER	If scale is greater than 0, numeric(p,s) is created. If scale is 0, an integer is created.	integer = 4 bytes numeric with precision of 9 or less = 4 bytes numeric with precision of 10–18 = 8 bytes numeric with precision of 19–38 = 16 bytes
OBJECTID	integer	4 bytes
SHORT INTEGER	smallint	2 bytes
TEXT	Variable length, Unicode(p) Where p is the field length you specify for the TEXT field. The default value is 50.	p x 4 = number of bytes used