I have over 180,000 shapefiles that I have to merge (or append) into a final shapefile. I have written a python script to do so which uses the acrpy.append_management tool. However the runtime is too long.
I was thinking of maybe testing out the merge tool but I am skeptical that it will accept this many shapefiles and merge them together in a reasonable amount of time.
Does anyone have any experience in merging large datasets? Is there an efficient way to merge large amounts of shapefiles?