How can I connect Portal directly to SDE feature classes?

BrettThome

I'm a GIS Technician, and I don't have much exposure to how everything works and relates regarding SDE/Server/Portal. Is it possible to link SDE directly to Portal? I'm having a hard time understanding how everything connects from the Esri articles. My assumption from what I've read is that you can configure SDE/Server to a server site, and then have the portal read from the server site. Is this correct? Essentially, the end goal would be to have information in Portal reading directly from SDE feature classes in relatively "real-time" to use for both web mapping purposes and to connect the Portal to a third party browser-based software (PSD CityWide). I would like to have up-to-date GIS data for these purposes without having to upload shapefiles.

As an aside, I currently use auto updating scripts that update hosted feature layers in ArcGIS Online based on the layers within an ArcGIS Pro document (the layers are referencing SDE feature classes). Am I reading into this too much, or would I want to find a similar solution to what I've already done for ArcGIS Online? This article describes what I currently have in place for ArcGIS Online: Updating your hosted feature services with ArcGIS Pro and the ArcGIS API for Python 

JonathanQuinn

Yes, you're correct. Portal knows that you have a hosting server, which will give you the ability to publish hosted services, but it doesn't know anything other than that. If you want to pull in data from your enterprise geodatabase, you'll need to register it as a data store:

Data sources for ArcGIS Server—Manage data | Documentation for ArcGIS Enterprise 

Once you do that, you can publish services referencing data in your enterprise geodatabase, and new items will be created in portal that point to those services. If the data within your enterprise geodatabase behind the services changes, those changes will be reflected within your applications.

So portal never directly communicates with your data in your enterprise database, but it serves as a catalog for the services that are hosted on your federated servers. Those services may be using data from your enterprise database. This white paper goes into a bit of detail about managed data (data in the ArcGIS Data Store) and user managed, (data in your enterprise database):

https://www.esri.com/content/dam/esrisites/en-us/media/whitepaper/data-in-arcgis-user-managed-and-arcgis-managed.pdf 

There's also a notion of "bulk publishing", where you can upload a database connection file to Portal. All feature classes within the database are created as items in the portal. The connection between the service and the data is still facilitated by Server, though:

User-managed data stores in ArcGIS Enterprise—Portal for ArcGIS | Documentation for ArcGIS Enterprise 

Publish layers in bulk from a user-managed data store—Portal for ArcGIS | Documentation for ArcGIS Enterprise