Only load the top N rows of a large table

[AJR]

When connected to an enterprise geodatabase, opening a table with a large number of rows (millions) takes a super long time (minutes or hours).  Pro seems to try to read the entire table from the database into memory before displaying any of the rows.  A much better approach would be to load the first few hundred (or thousand) records so that they can be displayed rapidly and then page through additional records if needed (often we only want to look at the first handful of records anyway).  The data access extension for ArcView 3 was better than Pro at this!

[RPGIS]

Hi @AJR,

So when it comes to displaying large datasets where you simply want to view a small subset of that dataset, then I would highly recommend creating a query layer so that it only pulls records based on what parameters you set and it can also limit the number of records that get returned. A query layer, if you don't know, can directly access a database table and pull records using a SQL query rather than trying to connect to the database and read the records in pro.

Just a suggestion.

[AJR]

Thanks.  I know I can create a query layer that pulls a subset of the data, but that's an extra few steps to take (when I already have the feature class/table in my project).  A better option would be to have the software page through large datasets rather than trying to load the entire dataset into memory.