Why do I need to an outage to add a new layer to an existing feature dataset in ArcSDE? In our published read-only geodatabase, we average about 800 concurrent connections. This database is used 24/7 for internal and external services. If we have a new layer that needs to be added to a feature dataset I can not do this without either:
1) Official Method: Killing all user sessions that may be locking the feature dataset, which is basically all 800 sessions.
2) Backdoor Method: Deleting all records in the SDE.TABLE_LOCKS table referencing the feature dataset.
The only practical method is unsupported.
We need a way to do simple maintenance operations on a geodatabase without booting off all the users. The same applies to editing domains, adding columns, creating attribute and spatial indexes.
If Oracle is not locking the objects then why should ESRI? These are read-only users. They should not care, and definately should not prevent, another layer being added to a feature dataset or a spatial index being built.