Locators showing as table, not as locator

[mpboyle]

Our locators are showing as tables, not as locators.  I don't know how this happened or what triggered it.  Even if I try creating a new address locator, it gets created as a table.

Has anyone else experienced this issue or have any ideas what the cause is?

System details:

1) SDE = 10.1

2) Desktop = 10.3

3) RDBMS = SQL Server 2008 R2 sp1 64bit

[JoeBorgione]

Are you storing your locators as an object in your SDE database? If so, perhaps that's the issue given the version differences.   I keep all my locators in a shared drive directory instead of in any flavor geodatabase.  Much less overhead that way...

[mpboyle]

We do keep the locators stored as an object within SDE ... and by that I assume you're asking whether or not the actual locators are stored in SDE...?

Keeping the locators in a separate file gdb in a shared drive is not a bad work around since the source data could still point to SDE.

Thanks for the suggestion.

[JoeBorgione]

No need to keep them in a file geodatabase either.  In fact I suggest not to.  I keep all my locators in a shared drive folder called (wait for it...)  Locators.  And yes you can point them to your sde data.  Just remember, that any edits will not be reflected in the locators until you rebuild the locators.  If you publish any of them, that means stopping the service first.

In my particular situation, the published locators are used by 9-1-1 dispatchers, so I have an A and B set of locators.  At any given time, one is 'hot' and the other 'not'.  That means the dispatchers are using the hot one.  I shut down the not one, rebuild the locator(s) and then toggle the users from what they have been using to the one with fresh data.  So what was hot is now not and vice versa.  I then go the the rebuild process again so I'm always up to date on both...