Relationships Classes vs Native SQL Relationships

[ZachPorteous]

Hello,

Is there detailed documentation about what considerations there are when choosing between relationships inside of an enterprise geodatabase and relationships stored in native sql? Can we begin a discussion? Its my understanding that ArcSDE will not necessarily know about relationships that are not relationship classes in an enterprise geodatabase. When should we choose one or the other? 

[Scott_Tansley]

Well the first thing to consider is that in a standard database you create a view from say table1 to table2.

In a geodatabase, you will likely have feature classes registered as versioned.  As soon as you do that then you have table1, a_table1, d_table1 and then the related table2.  A relationship class is versioning (and generally geodatabase) aware.  If you start to add in archiving and all the rest, then it becomes a minefield.

I know that some organisations will edit without versioning being registered.  And creating SQL (not geodatabasae) views will work nicely, until you start enabling geodatabase features and then it breaks down quite quickly.