Enterprise GIS / SDE
Introduction
As GIS Administrators, Programmers, and Web Developers we spend most of our time dealing with the back-end of ArcGIS through Microsoft SQL Server and Web GIS Administration. One of us manages a small Enterprise GIS Environment with 5 – 10 virtual servers and approx 60 GIS users. Two primary SQL Servers, a production, and a publication server, that have 100+ production features and 300+ publication features. The production features have editor tracking, archiving, domains, and other advanced concepts. We also are used to replicating feature and “building” features using ArcPy. We schedule our jobs usually using SQL Server scheduled jobs.
All of us have several “main” .py scripts that call other “module” python scripts that house the actual variable paths to our features. This allows us to reduce the number of SQL Scheduled jobs and greater flexibility when it comes to scaling or modifying the scripts. Our focus is on speed and efficiency of the scripts. Our scripts will:
- Email people based on specific columns’ field value(s)
- Re-cache Tiles and Stop / Start Web Services
- Rebuild a Network Analyst Service on a nightly basis using a Dissolved Network
- GIS License User Logging by parsing the License Manager .txt file
- Database Maintenance / Version Maintenance
We say all of this to say: We have a fairly decent understanding of the way an Enterprise ESRI GIS Environment looks, and we’ve built a County GIS Environment from the ground up.
Our goal here at BeeMAPS is to walk you through building a new production/publication / web environment from start to finish. We’ll show you the barebones of the Python scripts, the way replication/versioning/ feature class maintenance works, and how to deploy and scale Web GIS services.
This will be a series of blog posts covering various topics including hardware, licensing costs, Permissions, Python (ArcPy), and Web GIS (Web Maps, ArcGIS Server, RESTful Services, Etc).