I am an analyst and far being from a DBA tasked with looking into implementing an Enterprise set up for our office. I am trying to understand how an ArcGIS for Server deployment might work for us. We currently do not have an existing DBMS for our GIS data, so I am wondering whether building a DBMS is required for an ArcGIS for Server deployment or if there might be a workaround such as using Esri's File GDBs.
You won't need an enterprise geodatabase or database if you don't plan on using feature services. You can publish map services from file geodatabase or shapefile data. If you're looking into ArcGIS Enterprise, you can use the ArcGIS Data Store as your backend database. That will allow you to publish hosted feature services without needing a DBA to manage the database.
Thank you, Jonathan. This is very helpful. It is desirable for us to publish hosted feature services. Specifically, we would require these services to be hosted locally. Therefore, can we deploy the ArcGIS Data Store locally on our LAN and still not have an existing DBMS for this disconnected architecture?
