What Columns Does Versioning Add - Changed to *Archiving Add

[CodyPatterson]

Hey all,

Big edit, I was initially thinking that these columns caused the issue, but I have now found that Archiving is doing the work that's causing the issues, these columns are creating my issues:

Recently, I worked with an ESRI Tech in order to enable versioning on my dataset, that has completely toppled our production network seemingly by just adding these few columns to all the tables. (Not ESRI Tech's fault)

I am currently in the stages of grief and am working through removing these versioned columns from the tables that are currently equipped with them. I was curious if anyone knows what exact columns are added when versioned data is enabled? I want to be sure that I'm removing the correct columns and returning my data to production, as with a few tests, once a few columns are removed, the table becomes active once more, but I haven't found which exact columns are the ones.

I was curious if these may be it?

Thank you in advance!

Cody

[RobertKrisher]

@CodyPatterson In a perfect world you could restore from backup to before you enabled versioning. Do not attempt to manually remove the columns from the database, since they will cause the database to become out of sync with the system tables in the geodatabse. Instead, you can unregister the dataset(s) as versioned using the same tools you use to register the database as versioned. This will allow the system to remove all the necessary columns, remove any versioning history, and update the corresponding system tables to acknowledge that the data is no longer versioned.

[CodyPatterson]

Hey @RobertKrisher 

I'll attempt to remove the versioning using the Geoprocessing tools associated, you bring a great point about being out of sync along with the backup, I can check to see if that is a possibility as well.

I will update with my progress as goes!

Thank you,

Cody

[MarceloMarques]

Hello @CodyPatterson 

Register as Traditional Versioning does not actually add columns, it creates new tables in the database called delta tables.

For each featureclass there will be an Adds table (A_#) and a Deletes table (D_#).

When you enable Geodatabase Archiving it creates a new table <featureclass_name>_H.

When you enable Geodatabase Editor Tracking then new columns are added to the featureclass e.g. creation_user, date_created, date_modified, etc.

When you Register as Branch Version then new columns are added to the Featureclass, there are no extra tables created in this case.

The Featureclass can have only one type of versioning enabled, "Traditonal" or "Branch".

When you Unregister as Traditional Versioning then the Delta tables (Adds table and Deletes table) are dropped, when you do this, you will lose all the edits performed in the existing versions, make sure to reconcile and post to sde.default version all the edits before doing this if you want to keep your edits.

When you disable Geodatabase Archiving the tool will ask if you want to remove the Archiving table _H.

When you disable Editor Tracking it will not remove the editor tracking fields, you need to manually remove those fields after you have disabled Editor Tracking.

I hope this clarifies.

[CodyPatterson]

Hey @MarceloMarques 

Thank you for the information, I have seemingly misled everyone reading this due to the issue originating from Archiving rather than Versioning as I was initially thinking. I left an edit on my further down reply and mentioned that as well but it was more than likely while you were writing. I was curious if disabling archiving will remove these?

Thank you,

Cody

[CodyPatterson]

Hey @RobertKrisher 

Another update, I went and attempted to mark these as unversioned and it states that they are not versioned to begin with. I may be misunderstanding what's going on, but I checked out the database through SQL Studio and I found that there are a few columns added onto the end, I was curious if you knew if these were involved in the versioning?

Edit: After using my brain for a moment, I googled it and found that it's related to archiving, if I disable archiving, will it remove these?

Thank you,

Cody

[MarceloMarques · Accepted solution]

@CodyPatterson - GDB_FROM_DATE and GDB_TO_DATE - your Featureclass has Geodatabase Archiving enabled, when you disable Geodatabase Archiving the tool will ask if you want to remove the _H table ( H for history) after that you can go and drop the archiving columns GDB_FROM_DATE and GDB_TO_DATE.

More info: Enable archiving—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation

[CodyPatterson]

Hey @MarceloMarques 

Thank you and Robert for the great responses, just to confirm, if I disable archiving and choose not to preserve the history table, the FROM and TO columns will still be present, I will just need to manually drop them?

Thank you,

Cody

[MarceloMarques]

That is correct.

[RobertKrisher]

@CodyPatterson yep, those are the archiving fields. So instead of using the tools to unregister the datasets as versioned you will use the tools that @MarceloMarques mentions.