I regularly partition data by schema to manage access, but never do solely on the basis of
spatial/non-spatial (I'm not sure if I really accept that there *is* non-spatial data, vice explicit
and implicit spatial data).
An ArcSDE 8.3 -> 9.3.1 "upgrade" isn't really possible (without several intermediate steps),
and 9i and 11g are sufficiently different that a fresh reload is likely your best migration path.
If you have versioned tables, preserving the versions during migration will be quite challenging.
The same goes with complex geodatabase behaviors and, to some extent, rasters.
If you have all simple non-versioned vector featureclasses at 8.3, then 'sdeexport' is your easiest
transfer methodology (you'll need to read up on storage method options for 'sdeimport', since
SDEBINARY is not available on 11g platforms). All other transfers would require more input
(including which versions of ArcGIS you have available to support incremental upgrades
via personal geodatabases).
You might be jumping the gun on 11gR2 support at 9.3.1 (10.0 is certified with R2 on more
platforms than 9.3.1), so you probably want to make sure it will work with 9.3.1 on your
platform before you proceed.
- V
