So I’m looking at possibly using PostgreSQL for our enterprise geodatabase.  I was working on installing ESRI’s Public Safety COP web mapping application and I was copying feature classes from a file based geodatabase that comes with the app into PostgrSQL and received this error:

“ERROR 000210: Cannot create output Database Connections … Column already exists [ERROR: column name “xmin” conflicts with a system column name …”

What?  You got to be kidding me!  I was following the directions!  I tried ESRI tech support but for some reason they were swamped and could not help me … I’m still waiting for their call back.  Probably everyone is installing their apps!  So I decided to figure this thing out myself.

So I cannot have a field named XMIN as an attribute to my data?  After consulting the PostgreSQL documentation, sure enough, I cannot have XMIN or XMAX as field names because they are reserved system columns.

Great!  So I guess I cannot use the Public Safety COP or any data that has XMIN or XMAX field names with PostgreSQL.  Hmm.  So I thought I would try our Oracle enterprise geodatabase to see if that works. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!  I got this error:

“Underlying DBMS error [ORA-00972: identifier is too long (DEV.DamageResidentialBuilding_ATTACH)] …”

This is very sad!  I think I will go fire up Workstation ArcInfo and be happy!

And it likes XMIN and YMIN too!

-mike