I'm currently working on migrating from Server 9.3.1 to Server 10.3.1. In the old version, I had been storing multipoints, terrains, and product rasters like hillshades and accumulation in SDE. We liked the performance gains and permission levels we could get in SDE.
Now I'm learning about the new way that Lidar is handled in 10.x. It seems like now the more direct way to use Lidar data is directly from the LAS files, to create LAS datasets or Mosaic datasets that point back to the LAS in their native format. I have been reading some interesting discussions on this like http://https://community.esri.com/message/439203#439203 but thought I'd start another discussion with my additional questions rather that hijack theirs.
It seems that now there isn't a good reason to keep my Lidar sets in an enterprise geodatabase, except for those that are already stored in SDE. I might want to move those over for the users that are comfortable with the terrain approach and have many map projects using them. However, one of the features we liked about SDE was the ability to limit edit (write) permissions to data to just a few of us. Do folk use just network permissions to limit access to the LAS stored in their native format?
I have one server running SQL Server, and one server to run ArcServer. I'd planned to allocate more storage space on the SQL Server than the ArcServer machine. For best performance, should I plan for more storage space on my ArcServer for the LAS files rather than store them on the machine running SQL server?
