EXTREMELY SlOW JOINS

[KeithHenderson]

I'm having a bear of a time with what should be a simple task.  Joining property sales data to parcels that have been mapped.  The join works fine but takes forever.  Then, once the join is completed, it takes longer than forever for either the layer to draw or the attribute table to open.  There are only 2,800 records in my dataset so this should not be happening.  Additionally, if I try to export the data to create a new shape with the data I have joined, I get "Create output class feature failed."

[JakeSkinner]

Hi Keith,

How is your data stored?  For example, a File Geodatabase, SDE Geodatabase, Shapefile, DBF table, etc.  Are you accessing any of the data over a network?

[KeithHenderson]

Sorry to take so long on this.  I sort of gave up and just waited and waited and waited until I could finish the project,

Still using shapefiles (I'm an old man).  Yes, it is over a network but I did try to see if that was the issue by storing my map and data to a local drive.  I also tried converting to a geodatabase and storing that on my local drive but that gave me the same error message.

[JakeSkinner]

Would you be able to zip and upload the data you are working with?  It sounds like it's data specific.

[JeffPace · Accepted solution]

Its doing full table scans.  Make sure you build an attribute index on the fields you are joining on.

[KeithHenderson]

I did switch to the geodatabase format and that helped significantly but creating the file still took forever.  Probably just a problem with our miserable network.