Archiving and Unversioning

[JoseSousa]

Dear Esri Geodatabase and SDE Team,

I am currently using Archiving in a versioned environment to ensure History.

For database maintanence purposes I require to Unregister the geodatabase as versioned.
This implies that I will have to Disable Archiving and Compress the geodatabase before the unversion operation.

When disabling the Archiving I choose to option No (preserve the archive class as a temporal table with gdb_from_date and gdb_to_date attributes, which you may still query and view in ArcMap) because it is VERY IMPORTANT to preserve these changes.

After performing all database changes and restoring the versioning and enabling the archiving I have noticed in the database engine that it creates again a new table *_H1 to support archiving and when trying to add the Historical Archive to ArcMap it is only able to ensure history till the moment of the new creation. It does not provide support for the other table that still exists in the database as *_H.

What is the recomendation of Esri for this kind of procedure? How can I query and view in ArcMap the other table that was associated with the feature class before disabling the archiving?
It is said in the documentation that it is possibly to query and view in ArcMap the table but I haven't figure out a way.

http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#//00270000004s000000.htm

Cheers,
José

Can

[CherylCleghorn]

Jose

When you disable archiving and choose to preserve the archive class, that _H table/feature class is now promoted to a regular table/feature class. So you can add it to the map document (add data, drag and drop...) and use it just as you use your other tables/feature classes.

Regards
Cheryl

[JoseSousa]

Hi cherylc,

Indeed you are right. I have some feature datasets and several feature classes inside them. When I disable the Archiving I haven't noticed that they were promoted to regular featureclasses and gone out of the Feature Dataset.

Tks a lot,
José

[TuckerAlley]

The promoting to a full feature class is helpful.   However, once that is done, and archiving is enabled again it would be nice to reload the data found in the feature class back into the newly created history table.  Is there any way to do so?  We rely on the history have had to disable archiving a couple of times over the past year and it gets confusing as to which location to look in to find the history you need.

[TomBrown]

Jose,

Can you please explain what type of database tasks/maintanence you are performing for which you must disable your archive, compress and unregister the data as versioned?

Thank you.

[TuckerAlley]

Sure,

This was not normal maintenance.  We had issues with the topology becoming corrupted that resulted in us having to un-version the data delete the topology, rebuild topology and reversion.  Unfortunately this happened about 3 times over a 9 month period.  He determined the cause to be running an append to one of the feature classes.  Now that we do not regularly do that we have not had any more issues.  I would still like to combine all the old archives.

[NateArnold]

I just wanted to revive this topic, as I've run into this again using 10.1 SP1 which I'd hoped handled this differently. 

When copy/pasting between geodatabases, an archive-enabled feature class loses its history table.  This seems counter to the concept of archiving - what are the chances that nothing will ever go wrong with your enterprise GDB?  Or, in our case, when migrating to a new RDBMS platform?  Or, what if you want to serve archive-enabled data via file GDB? 

Feature attachments go along with the feature class with copy/paste operations, so why not archive classes too?  Or, at the very least why doesn't an option exist toreuse existing _H tables when enabling archiving, instead of ignoring it and making a bunch of _H1 tables?  Is ESRI's workaround that you should just load up all the records from your original _H tables into the new _H1 tables?  Seems like there should be a better way (and if there is, please let me know!).

Nate

[ThomasKonzel]

I would also like to revive this topic because we're investigating the need to add more topology rules to our existing Land Feature Dataset.  Upon researching, I'm not finding much on the best way, neither by documentation nor work-around, to handle this.  We're on 10.0 SP3.

I thought that copying the _H table into the _H1 table might be an option, but I don't want to venture down that path unless I absolutely need to.

Thanks in advance.

[Waan]

Tucker, Tom, or Nate--did anyone find a useful solution/workaround to this? -W

[AsrujitSengupta]

This is still a limitation and there are no future plans as of now to support the ability to unregister archiving and then reattaching the previous archive class.

However, starting from 10.2.x, Archiving can be enabled on non-versioned data as well...in case this helps.

Enabling archiving

ArcGIS Help (10.2, 10.2.1, and 10.2.2)