Maptek Vulcan has a procedure to lock databases when
they are in use. If you’ve ever used the
software you’ve seen the green, orange or red locks on the database in the
Vulcan Explorer. The green lock means
that the database is open by you and that you have read-write privileges to
modify it. The red lock means that the
database is open by someone else and that you can load and copy layers from it
but you can’t write back to the database.
The orange lock means that the database has crashed and should be
recovered and unlocked.
Occasionally, you’ll come across a database that is locked, but when you try to unlock it you find out that it is locked by you. It’s always funny when a new engineer or
geologist sees this and thinks that they have done something wrong. In reality, this is just an artifact of the
crash that caused the database to be locked in the first place. Fixing the problem requires a few short
steps:
- Right click on the Taskbar at the bottom of your screen and select ‘Start Task Manager’
- Go to the ‘Processes’ tab
- Select envis_gui.exe (envis being short for Envisage and gui standing for the Graphical User Interface) and click ‘End Process’
That’s it. Now when
you try to unlock the database you shouldn’t have any problems, although you may want to press F5 to refresh the screen.
This issue is the result of the envis_gui executable being
left running after a Vulcan crash. It
doesn’t always happen, but sometimes envis_gui.exe doesn’t get shut down as part of the
crash procedure. Restarting your
computer will accomplish the same task (closing envis_gui.exe) but it takes
longer. Now you know how to unlock a
Maptek Vulcan database that has been locked by you.