ESRI File Geodatabase raster (OpenFileGDB)

Added in version 3.7.

Driver short name

OpenFileGDB

Driver built-in by default

This driver is built-in by default

The OpenFileGDB driver provides read access to raster layers of File Geodatabases (.gdb directories). The dataset name must be the directory/folder name, and it must end with the .gdb extension.

It can also read directly zipped .gdb directories (with .gdb.zip extension), provided they contain a .gdb directory at their first level.

The driver supports:

  • reading CRS information

  • reading geotransform

  • exposing overviews

  • exposing nodata mask band or nodata value

  • uncompressed, LZ77, JPEG and JPEG2000 compression methods.

  • exposing value attribute tables as GDAL Raster attribute tables.

Support for FileGDB created by ArcGIS v10 has been added in GDAL 3.7 Support for FileGDB created by ArcGIS v9 has been added in GDAL 3.8

Driver capabilities

Supports Georeferencing

This driver supports georeferencing

Supports VirtualIO

This driver supports virtual I/O operations (/vsimem/, etc.)

Connection string

When a File Geodatabase contains several raster layers, the raster layer that must be opened is specified with the following connection string

OpenFileGDB:"/path/to/my.gdb":name_of_raster_layer

When opening a dataset with pointing only to the .gdb directory, and if it contains several raster layers, a list of subdatasets is returned by the driver

Open options

Open options can be specified in command-line tools using the syntax -oo <NAME>=<VALUE> or by providing the appropriate arguments to GDALOpenEx() (C) or gdal.OpenEx (Python). The following open options are available:

  • NODATA_OR_MASK=[AUTO/MASK/NONE/numeric nodata value]: Control nodata handling.

    • In AUTO mode, the driver will expose a dataset nodata mask band, unless the band data type is Float32 or Float64, in which case a nodata value is used.

    • In MASK mode, the driver will expose a dataset nodata mask band for all data types.

    • In NONE mode, the driver will not expose a nodata mask band or a nodata value.

    • When specifying a numeric nodata value (nan accepted for Float32 or Float64), it is used as the band nodata value. The nodata value should be selected outside the range of valid values (but within the range of the data type).

Metadata

The xml:documentation and xml:definition metadata domains contain the XML content from the GDB_Items table related to the raster layer.

Examples

  • List raster layers from a FileGDB

    gdalinfo /path/to/my.gdb

  • Open a given subdataset:

    gdalinfo OpenFileGDB:"/path/to/my.gdb":name_of_raster_layer

Credits

Thanks to Richard Barnes and his ArcRescue tool for the deciphering of the band_types field which indicates the compression method and the data type.