Appending Data periodically to a SDE Feature Class

[timdunlevie]

Hi all,

I'm pretty new to this but we have a ArcGIS database with many Feature Classes.

I have one Feature Class with around 65,000 objects which I want to update on a monthly basis.

I need to be able to compare records from one month to the other.

What is the best practise to do this?

I was thinking of utilising a date-loaded field so that I can compare the months?

Or should I be using versioning?

The Feature Class will eventually have > 1,000,000 records if I keep appending new monthly data to this feature class each month.

I am hoping to compare changes in objects across many months.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks

[NeilAyres]

Why don't you just enable editor tracking?

This provides created / edited dates and users automatically.

See here :

http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.2/index.html#//00170000016p000000

[timdunlevie]

Good point…thanks.

I guess I’m worried that with months of updates (potentially years and appending lots of objects ~ 60K each time) might cause some speed issues to the Database down the track?

[VinceAngelo]

Best practice is to only change the objects that really change.  I'd use a parallel table which is truncated with each new batch, then only add new records and update changed ones.  This will require a unique key which is not the rowid column (something in the data).  Archive History may also be of use.

- V