Faster way to “geocode” on unique ID?

Question

I've inherited some scripts that (to my mind) "abuse" geocoding to position points based on a LocationID field. As the name implies, this field is a unique ID that really doesn't need to be "fuzzy matched"; either it matches or it doesn't. Besides that, using the geocoding tools for this process is painfully slow; some 5 minutes or more to geocode less than 100k records.

I've tried using joins, with not much luck:

• Joining the tables to the reference points with AddJoin: with "KEEP_ALL" results in all the points, some with no data; with "KEEP_COMMON" results in only matching points, but loses data where multiple rows have the same LocationID.

• Joining the points to the tables with AddJoin results in tables, not point features.

• Joining either way with JoinField is even slower than geocoding, and has the same issues as above.

• None of these methods produces a new feature class as geocoding does; that takes a CopyFeatures either before or after the join. (SpatialJoin does, but it's out of the question since one input is a table....)

So, is there any faster way to do this using GP tools – if not, that might explain why it is the way it is – or should I look to a lower-level solution (arcpy.da or the like)?

(To clarify, the output I'm looking for is a point feature class: each point has data from a row in the input table, but there may be multiple points in a given location.)

Answer 1

It is about transferring points coordinates to table. You might use this process:

1. Add X and Y fields to points' table
2. Join above to TABLE using common field. Calculate similar field e.g. [XN]=Points!X
3. Export joined table to new one.
4. Create XY event table from output at step 4. Based on your Q you'll end up with duplicate points in some cases.