I'm hoping to obtain some advice/best-practices recommendations from the community on automatically updating map services from SQL Server... Here's a bit of the back story:
I currently utilize ArcGIS Server to publish map services and spatial utilities that are consumed by a JS/ASP.NET application. Unfortunately, I am unable to utilize SQL Server spatial datatypes (not by my choice - maybe it will change in the future), so, when I display data using the JSAPI, it's through AJAX SQL calls that return a JSON object, or, through binding JSON data, obtained from a SQL proc call, to the map service template through a PK (say, to create a choropleth).
This works fairly well, but I would really, really like to tap into the map services' inherent abilities to pipe-in data for consumption, like serving-up on-demand features based on map extent/zoom level, etc. If you can imagine, sending large JSON objects can be problematic, and it leads to performance issues in the users browser, like when trying to show tens of thousands of points.
I can make connections to SQL through ArcGIS to access a table with the data I need - x/y coordinates are also available for spatial representation (I need to show points on the map). I came across this thread that would seem to do what I need:
Auto-updating map service via REST in ArcGIS for Server? - Geographic Information Systems Stack Exch...
It would probably work well if I had spatial datatypes enabled, but I since I do not, would I just create a Python process to kick-off at set intervals that would pull data from the table, then create a feature class and overwrite the map service on the server?
Any ideas would be appreciated!