Compacting

The clients are happy with the new optimization techniques introduced in the geodatabase. However, they noticed a bit of performance decline after intense editing sessions, and they asked you whether this can be fixed. We can introduce the concept of compacting here. Like compression, compacting can reduce the geodatabase's size and potentially speed up queries. In the database world, this process is commonly known as vaccuming. However, compacting works differently as compared to compressing. Except for lossy compression, compression in general doesn't exactly get rid of any bytes. It merely packs them up by grouping redundant pieces, while compacting physically deletes and purges unneeded orphan records. We will demonstrate how compacting works, but we first need to understand what happens while editing the geodatabase.

Compacting a file geodatabase

It is easy to compact a file geodatabase; actually, it is recommended to compact a geodatabase after a heavy edit session. To compact...