Should I store raster in ArcSDE Oracle Geodatabase

MarkChilcott

Hi Peoples.

What are the current thoughts around storage of rasters in Oracle ArcSDE Geodatabase?

A few years back - it was the thing to do.  Geodatabase became that central place where you could find all your vector and raster data.  But there were some catches - backup and restore of database, additional load on database, removing the raster if you had been unwise with tablespace placements through key words.  Rasters could increase the DB size very quickly compared to vector data.  Some unhappy DBAs.

With mosaic datasets, ArcGIS Server and Portal, increased ability of File Geodatabases, I suspect the storage of Raster in an Oracle database may not be 'best practice' any longer.

Thoughts?

Cheers,

Mark

MarkDonnelly

Hello Mark,

The current thinking is not to store imagery in the database but rather in a highly available file share.

As you surmised, you can create a mosaic dataset, which can reside in your Enterprise Geodatabase and it will reference the images on the file share. As you also pointed out, this simplifies the storage of imagery, rather than having to import the large files into the database.

Organisations are increasingly putting their imagery in the cloud in S3 buckets as this can be a cheap, scalable option. Note that mosaic datasets cannot reference web based URLs directly, only local ones (shared or local drives). To use mosaic datasets with imagery stored on S3 you would need to use Esri's Optimize Rasters tool. This tool creates raster proxies which can reference small local proxy files, which in turn redirect to the S3 hosted, web optimised files.

GitHub - Esri/OptimizeRasters: OptimizeRasters is a set of tools for converting raster data to optimized Tiled TIF or MR… 

As an alternative, using ArcGIS Enterprise 10.8, it is possible to use Image Layers. Image Layers can be created from registered Cloud Stores. The optimisation of the imagery for serving over the web is done automatically.

Mark