In this episode we answer a question from Anthony.
How do you know when to focus on building a geodatabase (let's say SQL server database) rather than just let the data sit in the shapefile?

I would say if you are planning to have multiple users accessing and editing the data, also if your data grew too large shape files might not be scalable to read. Also if you are planning to use the capabilities of Geodatabase such as domains, subtypes, attribute rules, versioning, archiving etc not to mention sharing as well. if you wont plan to use any of the above then shape file is a good choice. If you are planning to just maintain a shape file data of 10k or 100k features and you edit it yourself locally it works!