Geodatabase compression - Deleting All User Versions Required?

[AdityarajChavada]

I have read the documentation here - Geodatabase compression—Help | ArcGIS Desktop. As per this documentation, it is required to delete all the versions if you require to FULLY compress the geodatabase.

For a normal/routine compression, do you require to delete the versions? Does Esri recommend to delete all the versions to compress the SDE? We have over 25 user versions in the SDE. If we delete and create the user versions, the data editors are getting issues in the MXD (snapping needs to be reset).

We are using Oracle 11g RDBMS with ArcGIS 10.4. Any insight on the subject matter will be hugely appreciated. Thank you.

[Asrujit_SenGupta]

No, for a normal\routine compress it is not necessary to delete the Versions. Just disconnect the other connections, do the reconcile\post of wanted Versions, then perform the Compress.

You can perform the Full Compress weekly, bi-weekly, monthly....based on how much editing is done in that geodatabase.

[AdityarajChavada]

Thank you for your quick feedback, Asrujit! 

[deleted-user-S4ixiRWwfuX9]

@ Asrujit SenGupta

What does deleting Versions give you that reconcile/post does not?  

[JonathanFarmer_oldaccount]

Hi Miranda,

I just happened upon your question here and wanted to address it.

Deleting all versions in the geodatabase in relation to a Compress workflow is one of the ways that you can achieve a full compress. A full compress is when the StateID value for the Default version is at 0 meaning that all of the data for that particular feature is in the base table and nothing resides in the delta tables. For more information on achieving a full compress, see below:

Fully Compress a Geodatabase: Geodatabase compression—Help | ArcGIS Desktop 

It should be noted that this is not the only way to achieve a full compress. A user could reconcile and post all versions to the Default version and then re-reconcile all versions to Default again without posting. This gets around the need to delete the versions. I should also note that it isn't necessary to achieve a full compress during a standard compress operation, in fact, many of our users never do. But if you ever needed to unregister a feature class as versioned (as an example), you'd want to do this.

Hope that helps!

Jonathan