Locking in ArcSDE

[AllanBenvin]

Why do I need to an outage to add a new layer to an existing feature dataset in ArcSDE? In our published read-only geodatabase, we average about 800 concurrent connections. This database is used 24/7 for internal and external services. If we have a new layer that needs to be added to a feature dataset I can not do this without either:
1) Official Method: Killing all user sessions that may be locking the feature dataset, which is basically all 800 sessions.
2) Backdoor Method: Deleting all records in the SDE.TABLE_LOCKS table referencing the feature dataset.
The only practical method is unsupported.

We need a way to do simple maintenance operations on a geodatabase without booting off all the users. The same applies to editing domains, adding columns, creating attribute and spatial indexes.
If Oracle is not locking the objects then why should ESRI? These are read-only users. They should not care, and definately should not prevent, another layer being added to a feature dataset or a spatial index being built.

[ThomasEdghill]

Hi Allan, thank you for submitting this Idea. I wanted to share some resources which may potentially help you out here.

In ArcGIS Server, there is a way to disable schema locking on map services, on a per-service basis. We also have some documentation on schema locking in the Desktop documentation pages which helps to provide some additional information on how locks may be affecting your schemas.

If you have not experimented with disabling schema locking on the services in question, I would recommend seeing if that setting may make your administrative tasks easier. Please feel free to reply and let me know if there's any further information about how schema locks via ArcGIS Enterprise/ArcGIS Server are affecting you.