Raster drawing speed

[BrianZwilling]

We just finished loading our new county flight into sde(sql server).  It is a 6" color photo that covers more than 1250 square miles.  It is 680 gb loaded into its own sql server database.  We are concerned about the speed at which it draws dynamically in arcmap.  It is almost too slow to use for everday users.  We are working on caching a map service that will be available for users, but my question is how fast should a raster this size draw in arcmap?  Is there anything we can do to improve performance.   We have already built statistics for the database.

Thanks

Brian

[RobertBerger]

Hi Brian,

Do you mean you created a single raster dataset in SDE that is 600 GB in size? Is there a specific reason you load the data into SDE?
If you already have statistics and pyramids built, then sometimes analyzing your SDE can help (rebuilding the spatial index etc to improve performance).
A different way to manage all this data is to use the Mosaic Dataset at ArcGIS 10.0. It's designed to help you manage large amounts of data like you have. You can also serve it out (with a server extension) and you don't have to load the data into SDE. You can create the mosaic dataset in the SDE and it references your data on disk.
More information on the mosaic dataset
Analyze Geoprocessing tool for RDBMS

Hope this helps.

Robert

[BrianZwilling]

we created a database and loaded all of our tiles into the sde database.  There is one raster dataset in the database, and when it was finished the sql database was 680 gb.  We loaded it into sde only becasue that is how we serve out all of our data to our county users and we assumed it would be the most efficient way of handling that amount of data.  maybe serving something out that large isn't best done through sde?

[RobertBerger]

Hi Brian,

You can load this data into SDE but you don't have to. It depends on your organization and how you want to handle this amount of data. If you have ArcGIS 10.0 you can test with creating a mosaic dataset in SDE (or file geodatabase) and load the tiles on disk (on the hard drive, not SDE). This should be pretty quick to create (considering the amount of data) so you can see if the performance is better or not. You can serve out the mosaic dataset with the extension. If you have a lot of concurrent users then you can also use it to create a map cache. Other benefits include you can download from the mosaic dataset (or turn it off) and it's easier to find the tile you're looking for if you have a lot of data.
I'd suggest you try it to see if it suits your needs.
There are some help topics for mosaic dataset and managing large amounts of rasters in SDE.

Robert