Joining taking 36 hours - advice

[HarryBowman]

Both tables are in the same file GDB. Both are indexed on the join field. Running Join Field GP tool. After 13 hours, only 30% finished. It is only step one of about 10 such steps. ArcMap is only using 113 MB of my 12 GB of RAM and only one processor of 8, but I don't know how to make it go faster without chopping the data back into shapefile chunks. It's far too late for that this time and I will have to admit defeat *again* to my employer. Is ArcGIS Desktop simply not capable of handling operations on 20+million record joined file GDB tables?

[GhislainPrince]

Hi Harry,
an alternative approach is to do

MakeFeatureLayer, AddJoin, CopyFeatures.

No guarantee, but it may be significantly faster.

[HarryBowman]

Hi Harry,
an alternative approach is to do

MakeFeatureLayer, AddJoin, CopyFeatures.

No guarantee, but it may be significantly faster.

Thanks Ghislain, I'll give that a whirl. I killed the other join.

[SolomonPulapkura · Accepted solution]

I would also avoid, executing AddJoin in ArcMap with the respective tables added to the ArcMap session. There could be locks that slow it down. Try running the entire thing from ArcCatalog using Ghislain's advice as well.

[HarryBowman]

Thanks very much, guys!

I was able to perform the same operation in less than an hour by:
a) operating outside of ArcMap
b) using Make Feature Layer, Add Join, Copy Features
c) making the output a shapefile (it fit) rather than a feature class in the file GDB

I'll be in San Diego, hunt me up - I owe beverages.