topic Re: Creating views in SDE 10.3 in Data Management Questions

Creating views in SDE 10.3

KenCarrier — Fri, 19 Dec 2014 14:03:30 GMT

How are views managed in 10.3? At 10.2.2 creating a view inside SDE acted like a query layer. By this I mean when adding the view to ArcGIS Desktop you would be required to specify a unique ID field and a spatial extent. On the other hand when creating a view via SDE command line the view would get registered with sde and the user would not have to specify anything when adding that layer to ArcGIS Desktop. This is one function from sde command line which had better performance and usability than creating the views through ArcGIS Desktop. How has this changed in 10.3?

Re: Creating views in SDE 10.3

JakeSkinner — Fri, 19 Dec 2014 14:18:37 GMT

Hi Ken,

It appears Views are managed the same way in 10.3 as they were in 10.2.2. For any enhancements, I would recommend posting them on ESRI's Ideas page.

Re: Creating views in SDE 10.3

KenCarrier — Fri, 19 Dec 2014 14:22:20 GMT

I did post this a while back and it seems somewhat popular, not really understanding how Esri Geodata team could take away this functionality without providing a suitable replacement? Asking users to pick a unique id field and a spatial extent when they are not power users seems sort of counter productive in my opinion. Thank you for the prompt reply but I would really like to see Esri provide a tool to accomplish the same level of functionality that the sde create view command line provided us.

http://ideas.arcgis.com/apex/ideaSearchResults?s=Create+Views+In+ArcCatalog+Like+In+SDE+Command+Line&searchButton=search

Re: Creating views in SDE 10.3

KenCarrier — Fri, 19 Dec 2014 15:40:00 GMT

Jake,

sorry gave the wrong link, try this one and let me know if you agree or not please?

http://ideas.arcgis.com/apex/ideaSearchResults?s=Create+Views+In+ArcCatalog+Like+In+SDE+Command+Line&searchButton=search

Re: Creating views in SDE 10.3

JakeSkinner — Fri, 19 Dec 2014 15:54:54 GMT

Yes, I agree. You make valid points. I went ahead and promoted this idea.

Re: Creating views in SDE 10.3

RandyKreuziger — Tue, 23 Dec 2014 16:58:45 GMT

At the ESRI conference the ESRI staff at the Enterprise island said that they planed to have all functionality of the command line tools recreated in the GUI. I heard this twice. I guess I'm surprised. Also, I thing the ideas site has become a joke. It's just a feel good mechanism.

I've spent over a month coding workarounds for the bugs they introducted in 10.1 and those bugs still aren't fixed in 10.3. The most serious bug involving SQL native Geometry is 21 months old, has been assigned a severity of "medium" yet they can't say when it will be fixed. We only moved to the SQL Server Geometry type because of another but introduced in 10.1.

I miss the workstation days when a new versions contained new functionality and very few bugs!

Re: Creating views in SDE 10.3

JoshuaBixby — Tue, 06 Jan 2015 03:22:33 GMT

Agreed. The words keep coming out of their mouths, but actual progress has been painfully slow. Now they have released 10.3 and formally retired SDE command line tools, all while still missing quite a bit of functionality that used to exist. It is not uncommon to find SDE-related bugs, especially relating to views, where Esri's Support documentation says to use SDE command line tools as the workaround. I think the Development teams are putting the screws to their own Support staff as much as they are customers with this one.

Re: Creating views in SDE 10.3

JeffPace — Mon, 12 Jan 2015 15:17:05 GMT

promoted this idea as well

Re: Creating views in SDE 10.3

Greene_Chris — Thu, 22 Jan 2015 17:48:55 GMT

Have you heard anything back from esri about this? We just moved to 10.3 from 9.3(SDE)/10.2(desktop) and I'm rebuilding a bunch of models. What used to work with views are now crashing out due to a lack of OIDs. Apparently, even though there is the OID from a feature class participating in the view, this lack of registering with the geodatabase is making my views unusable in my models. I guess my only option is create copies of these views to use in the models? Which...contradicts the whole point of using views.

And thanks for creating the Ideas post. Hopefully someone out there in development is listening!

Re: Creating views in SDE 10.3

KenCarrier — Thu, 22 Jan 2015 18:00:24 GMT

Ok so here is the unofficial workaround. I reached out to someone I know at Esri for a workaround and here is what we both tested and found to work. I will tell you this probably will not be supported by Esri Support but it works.

Use 10.2.2 SDE command line to create your views in 10.3 SDE so they become registered with the sde user and geodatabase.

The views will look and function in 10.3 just as they did in 10.2.x and prior releases.

I have posted this enhancement on the ideas portal and got a work space granted for it but no one from Esri seems to be listening or responding from the geodata team.

I would think you could still use other versions of the sde command line to create the views in 10.3 but I would not go back beyond 10.1 in my opinion. If you are upgrading to 10.3 use the last known version of sde command line in my opinion, which would be 10.2.2.

Hope this helps and I will keep trying to pursue this with Esri. If I get no response I hope they do not mind getting some tough questions during the presentations at the Esri UC 2015 because they will be coming I am sure.

Re: Creating views in SDE 10.3

DavidColey — Sat, 14 Feb 2015 18:07:28 GMT

Ken, are you saying 10.2.2 command line op 'sdetable -o create_view' will work against a 10.3 instance?

Will other 10.2.2 command line ops work such as 'sdetable -o delete'?

Thanks

David

Re: Creating views in SDE 10.3

KenCarrier — Sat, 14 Feb 2015 19:01:10 GMT

Good question I did not test that command but I would assume it would work. I am on vacation right now if you can test this before I get back and post back here on the forum your results I am sure others as well as myself would be thankful.

Sent via the Samsung GALAXY S®4, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone

Re: Creating views in SDE 10.3

KenCarrier — Thu, 19 Feb 2015 17:31:21 GMT

Yes create_view from 10.2.2 command line will still work against a 10.3 SDE. I tested some other commands like delete and they work as well.

Re: Creating views in SDE 10.3

DavidColey — Thu, 19 Feb 2015 18:15:28 GMT

That's interesting. We'll be updating our dev instance next week to .3, I'll post back any thing I find....

Re: Creating views in SDE 10.3

MichelleMestrovich1 — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 14:12:12 GMT

Had a nice long chat with ESRI today about this issue. So apparently the plan was to port all the SDE command line functionality into 10.3 ArcCatalog. Well they decided to get rid of the command line even though they didn't have all the functionality ported yet (brilliant, I guess they were hoping we wouldn't notice).

In the meantime the course of action I'm taking and which is working is to load 10.2.2 SDE Command line tools and rebuild the views there for now. This keeps the ObjectID intact and working correctly.

Once they fix all the missing functionality in 10.3 then I'm going to rebuild the views using ArcCatalog. I like the fact that if you build the views there you have a different icon representing it as a view. I get a lot of question whether something is a view or layer so having the icons distinguishing the difference will help a lot.

After we talked the analyst also elevated the issue so hopefully it will be fixed sooner then later.

Re: Creating views in SDE 10.3

JoshuaBixby — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 15:03:42 GMT

In the realm of community planning, there is a model of public or stakeholder engagement/participation called Decide, Announce, and Defend (DAD), a.k.a., decide-inform-justify. It has been and continues to be the most common way most organizations (governmental, civic, private sector, academia) engage their stakeholders, but it is also a paternalistic model that some argue is outdated, even antiquated.

On the spectrum of DAD to informed consent, Esri is pretty far over on the DAD side whether we are talking about the retirement of SDE command line tools, the transition to MyEsri, or even their business processes as they relate to customers. Esri isn't unique in this regard, just look at all of the products Google unceremoniously jettisoned in the past year, but that isn't much consolation for ArcGIS users. I think there are IT companies that do it better, and I would like to see Esri improve their customer engagement from the introduction of new features to supporting those features throughout their lifespan and eventually retiring them.

Hope isn't a strategy, at least if you want to accomplish anything, but it can be a coping mechanism. So, I too will hope they fix some of these SDE command line issues sooner than later.

Re: Creating views in SDE 10.3

MichelleMestrovich1 — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 15:12:49 GMT

The first version of ESRI products I worked on was Workstation 5, way back in the '90s. I've been through quite a few releases of new software and it doesn't surprise me when I see things missing or now quite working as stated. One thing it has done for me is to think out side of the box and come up with workarounds. If anything it has made me more flexible and able to go with the flow.

Re: Creating views in SDE 10.3

JoshuaBixby — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 15:34:40 GMT

I hear ya. Usually there are workarounds, but not always. The frustration with relying on workarounds is that they tend to break even more frequently than ArcGIS between versions, which in effect puts you on a gerbil wheel. Workarounds are a necessity at times, but they are also wasted time when there is work to be done.

For your sake and mine, along with many others, let's hope each 10.3.x release adds more geodatabases administration functions/tools.

Re: Creating views in SDE 10.3

JohanWauters — Wed, 13 May 2015 10:29:58 GMT

We upgraded from 10.1 to 10.3: ArcGIS Desktop, ArcGIS Server, Geodatabase on SQL Server. We still use the sdelayer 10.1 tool to register the multiple (spatial) views on the 10.3 Geodatabase, and some people still use the existing sde service 10.1 connecting to the 10.3 Geodatabase.

Re: Creating views in SDE 10.3

MichelleMestrovich1 — Wed, 13 May 2015 13:53:01 GMT

Thanks, John.

I had a long talk with ESR Atlanta yesterday. It was rep who works between the customers and developer. She said ESRI is trying to figure out what to do about this, but it will most likely not be released until a later version if they do anything.

I was going to go ahead with using command line SDE 10.x to get stuff in, but decided since ESRI might go away from supporting, I'm going to create static layers.

Most of my views update the underlying data once a data so this I manageable. I'm just writing models to join the data and then update a static layer. I found I can do this even when I have locks on the data such as REST endpoints or users connected with minimal interruption to the user.

I really want Spatial Views to come back. I'm going to conference in July and I'm going to try and sit down with some folks and discuss this and really push for it to come back.

Mich 🙂