I work for a department that get's a regular City Council District Shapefile showing the boundaries of each Councilors District. In our SDE we have a Council_District table with an exact duplicate of the previous City Council District Shapefile.
In SDE we have added other fields, links to websites for each councilor, etc. We utilize Flex Maps to make these maps public.
Everytime a new updated shapefile comes out, we copy over the Shapefile and write-over the SDE version with the new data. Then we have to re-create the added fields and their data.
This requires that we shut down every web map using this file which can disrupt both in-house and external users and is not efficient at all.
We are currently running version 9 servers, we will be updating to 10.1 in January. We will NOT be updating to 10.2 (yet!) due to data issues from our data providers.
Question(s)
Is there any way to just update the SDE from the Shapefile to avoid thisor do we always have to shut down webmap services?