Introduction

The Feature Data Objects (FDO) API provides access to data in a data store. A provider is a specific implementation of the FDO API that provides access to data in a particular data store. The FDO Provider for SDF provides FDO with access to an SDF-based data store.

The FDO Provider for SDF uses Autodesk's spatial database format, which is a file-based personal geodatabase that supports multiple features/attributes, spatial indexing, interoperability, file-locking, and high performance for large data sets.

The SDF file format has the following characteristics:

• SDF files can be read on different platforms.
• The SDF file format has its own spatial indexing.
• SDF files can store geometric and non-geometric data with minimum overhead
• Although it does not support concurrency control (locking), the SDF file format is a valid alternative to RDBMS.

For more information, see The Essential FDO (FET_TheEssentialFDO.pdf) and the FDO Developer's Guide (FDG_FDODevGuide.pdf).