We jumped on board the parcel fabric bus shortly after ESRI started driving it. Our early entry got us some personal attention from ESRI, but it also got us involved in the early attempts to import "legacy" data into a fabric. Our import lacked a lot, and we're still paying some price for that--a lot of bad parcel dimensions & geometries got imported or created. We could have re-imported later, but we figured that would have been more painful than dealing with the stuff we had. Those bad dimensions hide undetected until one of those parcels gets taken into a job, then when the job is finished & parcels are re-joined, ArcMap tries to draw the parcel based on those wacky dimensions and all hell breaks loose, cartographically speaking. I think the import has improved significantly since those days "way back" in 2008, so this may not be an issue for you. Another issue that we've had is that we haven't yet been able to run a LSA successfully on our data. I can create a fabric & make some simple parcels, then run an LSA on them successfully. But even after double- & triple- & quadruple-checking all dimensions in several neighborhoods in our production data to make sure we had all record dimensions, LSAs failed in those neighborhoods regardless of what kinds of tolerances I used. It was probably a year ago that I last attempted an LSA. Maybe our fabric's hosed up as a result of those import issues, maybe the LSA logic needed tweaking, maybe I was doing something wrong, and definitely our control sucks right out the door in a couple areas. I have a feeling that, despite the ability for the fabric to hold dimensions measured in the 1890s, the fabric was designed with the assumption that everything in our parcel map was surveyed since 1985. Regardless of the reasons for the LSAs not working, I got tired of ramming my head into a wall and I gave up & devoted my efforts to things that had a chance of succeeding.
Bottom line: the fabric works well enough for us to take care of day-to-day parcel maintenance (splits, combinations, subdivisions) and our editors are pretty self-sufficient. But lots of the swanky things that made me jump at the fabric (mostly LSAs) haven't come to fruition for us yet, and the less time I spend talking about it the less money I spend on gin.
PS. Expect a thank you card from the folks at the Tanqueray distillery.
