I attended the Esri UC this past week and was a little surprised to learn that Distributed Geodatabase tools are not supported in Pro and there is currently no plan to implement them.
I understand Pro already has tools for downloading a map and working offline, and that seems fine for a replacement for check-in / check-out replicas. However, we rely pretty heavily on the one-way and two-way replica scenarios within our organization.
As an example, we have multiple editing geodatabases typically divided out by departments. As part of our daily workflow, we use the synchronize changes tool to push edits from our production editing geodatabases to two replicated geodatabases, one that is an internal read-only geodatabase where non-editors can read other departmental data and a second that is used exclusively for web services.
We are very happy with this workflow for a number of reasons:
- The number of users that can connect to a production editing database is relatively small and controlled
- Production database size stays relatively small
- High isolation of data ... for schema changes or other processes that require an exclusive schema lock, we only have to notify a small number of users. We can then make the necessary changes and NOT affect any web services or users that are not production editors.
In another example, we have a two-way replica established with a City government in order to replicate 911 datasets between our organizations. This workflow is important to both organizations as it greatly reduces the time it takes to compile datasets for dispatch updates and provides both organizations with current information in on-premise relational databases that are used for other business functions.
I'd like to hear from Esri folks what is being done to provide the same type of workflow with Pro tools? I don't see any other type of workflow that can be used with Pro to accomplish the same type of workflow. Copying datasets is NOT a realistic solution when replication is a much better solution. Neither is truncating or appending data. In both of these scenarios your moving entire datasets where replication will only move edits.
Again, I want to emphasize this is using one-way or two-way replication and NOT check-in / check-out. If there are other tools within Pro or at the Enterprise GIS platform that provide the same workflow, I'd be very interested in learning more about them.
Otherwise, I have to think I'm not the only person that's really disappointed to learn that replication / distributed geodatabase tools are not being implemented with Pro.