Take the 2-minute tour ×  My organization is working on an
application running on ArcGIS Engine. Previous versions of the
application used primarily Shapefiles for displaying roads,
parcels, buildings, etc. Since I was taught to avoid Shapefiles
when managing data at my college job, I suggested moving to file
geodatabases. Esri claims file geodatabases are optimized for
performance and storage. My co-worker remembers hearing that
Shapefiles usually draw faster. I didn't come across an article
directly talking about this topic, so I thought I would ask the
community. I'm leaning towards file geodatabases, but it would
be nice to know if I'm missing out on anything that Shapefiles
offer.  share|improve this question As a comment, shapefiles
offer the ability to be read, and used, by a wide variety of
proprietary and Open Source programs ... something geodatabases
don't ... in some circumstances this may outway display issues.
–  Dan Patterson Nov 23 '11 at 22:20 @DanPatterson You can
read/write file geodatabase