My co-workers ran into this problem with a particularly large table in a personal geodatabase (.mdb). They wanted to change a couple of field types from text to double, and then register the table with the geodatabase, but received errors with both tasks. MS Access will tell you to change your max locks registry entry, but that will get you only so far.
Their solution:
Open MS Access and create a copy of the table, retaining the table structure only, so you have an empty table. Make any changes to field types in the design of the empty table. Register this table with the geodatabase in ArcCatalog.
In MS Access, create an append query that writes all the records from the large table into the new, blank, registered table. If you're changing field types, you'll have to have your append query perform calculations to change text to numeric values or vice versa, but it works.
Posted by Charles on October 15, 2009 12:52 PM