topic Re: I need a tool or a process that does the reverse of the 'Enable Enterprise Geodatabase' tool. in Geodatabase Questions

I need a tool or a process that does the reverse of the 'Enable Enterprise Geodatabase' tool.

TomShewring — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 12:31:47 GMT

I have run the 'Enable Enterprise Geodatabase' tool from ArcGISPro 3.5.1 against a SQLServer database. This has created a number of SDE objects in the dbo schema.

How do I cleanly remove these SDE tables, views, stored procedures etc and in doing so effectively remove the SDE geodatabase without deleting the whole database?

I need a tool or a process that does the reverse of the 'Enable Enterprise Geodatabase' tool.

Re: I need a tool or a process that does the reverse of the 'Enable Enterprise Geodatabase' tool.

RyanUthoff — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 12:46:36 GMT

There is no going back once you run the Enable Enterprise Geodatabase tool on a DB. Your best bet is to restore your DB from a backup from before you ran the tool. You can try deleting all the Esri system tables, stored procedures, etc. in SSMS, but the only for-sure way that you'll be able to eliminate anything Esri related in the DB is to restore from a backup since before you ran the tool.

Re: I need a tool or a process that does the reverse of the 'Enable Enterprise Geodatabase' tool.

George_Thompson — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 10:45:11 GMT

I agree with @RyanUthoff on this.

If you do not have a backup, create a new SQL Server database and copy the data over.

Re: I need a tool or a process that does the reverse of the 'Enable Enterprise Geodatabase' tool.

VinceAngelo — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 02:00:36 GMT

Well, if you had used the sde schema, not sdo, and didn't register any user tables, then dropping the sde schema (including contents) could have been enough. And if you can identify all the dbo tables that were added (most have 'sde_' or 'gdb_' prefixes), you might be able to pull this off (again, provided you didn't register any tables).

Once you've registered a table with the geodatabase (with either sde or sdo model), the cleanup becomes significantly more complicated, and falling back to the last backup (Ryan's suggestion) makes good sense.

- V