So you are creating a locator within an SDE geodatatbase? I would suggest you not do that, but rather keep it in it's own directory. No problem to access or point to data in the SDE database, but it's much better practice not to store a locator as an object of any flavor of geodatabase; SDE, file, or personal. You've already made a case supporting this, right?
Anthony,
There is really no benefit with storing a locator in a geodatabase because a locator is all inclusive (it is a snapshot of the data). Also, the database overhead with storing it there has no benefits and will also cause a significant performance slowdown.
Brad
I'm having the same issue with 10.1 SP1.
I started the thread linked to above about slow performance of locators in SDE, so following the answers to that thread, built all my locators in a simple folder, and have been having great results for some time.
However, suddenly yesterday all our locators are corrupt with the error mentioned in the posts above and subject of this thread.
There seems to be no reason why this is happening...?
-m
I tried for months to get an automated python process going to update address locators similar to the method you described. If you haven't yet discovered, the bug that corrupts address locators when attempting to rebuild an empty table still exists in ArcGIS 10.2.2. Furthermore, even when there is data in the source table, I found that using the arcpy function to rebuild the address locator would inevitably corrupt them sooner or later! In the end we decided it was safest to do a manual rebuild in ArcCatalog - but even this fails sometimes with an error message simply stating "Can't rebuild address locator". Sadly, it seems the only reliable method is to manually delete and re-create address locators every time.