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Publishing to Spatial Data to Relational Databases

S_S_GIS
5 - Atom

We are in the process of deploying Alteryx and ArcGIS for our company. While Alteryx will be our data blending and prep tool, one of the challenges we have run into is publishing large spatial datasets (over 2 GB) that ArcGIS can read. While Alteryx cannot publish directly to a geodatabase, we are thinking about setting up a relational database (likely Oracle 12c Spatial and Graph) and publishing to it. Does anyone know if Alteryx can use the existing Publishing tool to write spatial data to a relational database? If yes, is there anything we should take into consideration for configuring the relational database. If no, has anyone had any experience trying to make Alteryx's yxdb file compatible with ArcGIS? 

2 REPLIES 2
dataMack
12 - Quasar

We are using Greenplum with the PostGIS plug in (https://gpdb.docs.pivotal.io/4350/ref_guide/postGIS.html).  It's based on PostGIS that works on a variety of Postgresql databases: http://postgis.refractions.net/

 

I don't think the yxdb format is compatible with amything outside of Alteryx, but since Alteryx and write to a variety of other formats including those used by Google Earth and ArcGIS, I would check those,  Sorry I'm not an ArcGIS user so can't help much beyond that.

 

As an aside- we've found that Alteryx on a single node server is faster at geospatial operations than a ~25-node Greenplum environment running that plug-in.  Quite a testament to Ned's engine!

Philip
12 - Quasar

We do data prep through Alteryx and publish to Microsoft SQL Server, which our ArcGIS people can connect through ArcMap and ArcCatalog. I'll avoid talking about our experiences of Oracle vs. SQL Server, but it is working fine for us.

 

We haven't had a large data set to test against with ArcGIS (largest so far is 212MB), but I can upload 2GB of data from a different data source through Alteryx into SQL Server using the SQL Server bulk uploader much more quickly than through an ODBC connector. I don't know about how fast uploading into Oracle or Postgres is, but if you're frequently uploading large spatial data sets, I would investigate upload speed as part of your consideration of what to deploy.

 

SQL Server bulk uploader is supported in the Alteryx output tool, and SQL Server can handle spatial data.

 

As for outputting data locally for ArcGIS, usually I have to rely on writing to shapefiles. I'd be really happy if Alteryx could support writing to Geodatabases.

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