One of my main tasks right now is to document many of the details of maintaining ArcSDE geodatabases so I anticipate having several blog posts on this topic that are re-writes of documents I am working on. I am presuming that the person will have no ArcSDE experience so I am documenting very detailed information. Almost all of the ArcSDE commands require that you specify which instance (service/port) the command applies to by using the ‘-i’ parameter.

Awhile ago, I had a ArcSDE problem that required ESRI technical support to help trouble-shoot. The problem was odd but was resolved by rebooting the server. During the process, though, the support person had me set a couple of environment variables for logging SDE activity on the client machine. The settings were SDEINTERCEPT and SDEINTERCEPTLOC. From ESRI’s Help, SDEINTERCEPT specifies what activity to log and SDEINTERCEPTLOC specifies where to save the log files.

Testing one of our geodata services, we discovered that it allowed us to extract a portion of our feature class but when we tried to extract the entire data set, we received this Data Extraction error: Data extraction failed. Proxy or Gateway Server did not allow the URL. Check with your LAN administrator that Proxy or Gateway server is configured to allow the URL. The fact that I was able to extract a portion of the data and I could see the entire geodatabase get made and zipped led me to believe it was more of time-out issue.

Random luck me to discovering a bug related to feature classes whose names start with ‘nd_'. It appears that you are allowed to create feature classes starting with ‘nd_’ but ArcCatalog will not display them. Further research shows this behavior also occurs for table and for ArcSDE (PostGres) geodatabases, personal geodatabase, and file geodatabases–I am using ArcCatalog 10.0. I first noticed something odd was occurring while importing a series of shapefiles into a geodatabases.

Discovered something today. I was working on an arcpy script that copies a raster dataset from a file geodatabase into a Postgres SDE geodatabase and then does some boring routine tasks–building stats, creating a mosaic dataset, adding the raster to the mosaic dataset and making a couple referenced mosaic datasets. It sometimes has trouble with the initial step of uploading the raster because of the sheer size of if (1m elevation raster for counties) and it failed today on one.

I am working on an data-entry application to edit feature classes that contain several coded-value-domains. The problem with some of the domains, however, is that some entries have been added after the initial creation. So the first 25 entries are in alphabetical order and there are some stragglers at the end that are in the order they were appended. This can be confusing for users–they go to select ‘Milli Vanilli’ and look between ‘Madonna’ and ‘Motley Crue’ but can not find their favorite band there–they have to go to the end of the list to find their selection.

While banging my head on how to grant access to a referenced mosaic dataset , I did something out of frustration that I normally would not do–I granted ‘public’ access to some data. Then, after figuring out the problem, I went to revoke public access using ArcCatalog and received this error message: Error 999999: Error executing function. The Object being referenced does not exist [ERROR: role ‘public’ does not exist::SQL state: 42704]

To better organize our ArcSDE data, we wanted to create multiple geodatabases and multiple ArcSDE services using one PostgreSQL database cluster (a cluster containing 1 machine at this point). A side question is why can’t tables and raster be placed in Feature Datasets? This wouldn’t be an end-all solution for what we want to do but there are some messy consequences of this limitation. ESRI has instructions on Setting up multiple geodatabases in one PostgreSQL database cluster on Windows which was helpful but we repeatedly got an ‘The ArcSDE Repository was unsuccessfully completed.

In building our Enterprise GIS Database, we need to support users with different needs. Some of our users just need to see the data on a map while others may want to download a copy of the data so they can use it within their own desktop system. After doing some exploring, one of the options that looks like it will feel the bulk of our internal needs is to create a Map Service/Geodata Service pair–by creating a Map Service, we can make an easy-to-use visual representation of our data.

We finally installed an instance of ArcSDE 10 today. My first attempt at connecting in ArcCatalog 9.3.1 failed with the following error: Failed to connect to the specified server. This release of the GeoDatabase is either invalid or out of date. [Please run the ArcSDE setup utility using the -o install option.] DBMS table not found [sde.sde.GDB_Release]  Turns out the solution was simple, this article points out that Service pack 2 is required.