Esri Mapping Center - Ask a Cartographer

Cartographic representations and slow drawing

January 06 2011 | 2 comments
Categories: Map Data, Symbology

I am using cartographic representations to symbolize roads which are a feature class in an SDE geodatabase. It takes an incredible amount of time to draw (several minutes to refresh). If I use symbol levels, the time to draw is prohibitively long. I recently converted a file geodatabase to SDE. This problem didn't exist in the file GDB. I am wondering if there is something to be done to lessen the draw time.
Thanks for your help.

Mapping Center Answer:

This sounds like an issue to bring to our Technical Support staff. We'll need more information to figure out what is going on, such as: is it in an Oracle, SQLServer, etc. DBMS? What version of ArcSDE? Is the geometry storage ST_GEOMETRY? Here's the first thing for you to check, though: Does the data have a spatial index? You can find out if you do have one and if it is the RIGHT one if you look at the properties of the feature class in ArcCatalog and review the information on the Indexes tab.

Here are some links that might help you to narrow down the problem if you want to do some investigating on your own:

http://blogs.esri.com/dev/blogs/geodatabase/archive/2008/04/03/five-best-practices-for-maintaining-an-enterprise-geodatabase.aspx

http://resources.arcgis.com/content/kbase?fa=articleShow&d=24518

http://resources.arcgis.com/gallery/video/geodatabase/details?entryID=B468B55E-1422-2418-A0C6-124022EF9664

http://resources.arcgis.com/gallery/file/geodatabase/details?entryID=E92AE91F-1422-2418-7F52-5F14B5750E96

thanks posted by Lori Anne Martin on Jan 7 2011 12:21PM

Thank you for your quick reply. We have checked the spatial index and it seems correct. We have found a work around solution but I will also look into what you suggest. The roads are made up of lots of segments so we reduced the number of segments and the drawing time was reduced substantially. The cart. reps. were lost though so we will have to do a good qc. Thanks again.

Dissolve posted by Aileen Buckley on Jan 7 2011 12:42PM

We often dissolve our road and other networks partly for this reason. You can still apply carto reps to the dissolved roads and you can even copy that symbology (if you still have it) to the new dissolved network.

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