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I have a SDE 10.0 Geodatabase based on MS SQL 2008.
I'm running a continuous process where about 6400 point features are written to a feature-class every hour. I need it to be a featureclass, since I'm doing some krigging on the feature-class, after applying an attribute query based on a time field in the data.
I was wondering what is the limitation on the number of features a SDE Feature-class can hold?
Two billion features, plus or minus (2^31-2 legal rowid values). I've only loaded 80m personally, but a colleague used my tools to load 680m in Oracle, SQL-Server, and PostgreSQL servers, side by side. That said, the effective useful limit is a lot closer to 20-50 million features.
Tables loaded over time are extremely vulnerable to the effects of spatial fragmentation, which will destroy spatial-first query performance in tables over 2 million rows. If you plan to let the table grow unbounded, you'll need to implement a mitigation plan.
There are an infinite number of permutations of database product, geometry storage, versioning status, and insert behavior which could limit row count -- 2^31-7 versioned edits of an SDEBINARY layer would limit the business table to 5 rows.
For your use case of simple feature insert, the limit is "two gigafeatures". Once you start moving features, then you run into a different limit -- "the total number of features a layer has ever held since the last TRUNCATE" (which is also two gigafeatures). This is probably why "the limit" is not documented.
Starting from 10.1 the new 64 bit version will allow you to store and index up to 2^64 records theoratically. That's alot.
Of course you have to enable geodatabase archiving if you are aiming this high.
