Data is an essential component of every GIS system. It provides the foundation for a wide variety of GIS workflows including mapping, analysis, and decision-making. How you choose to store your data impacts the business benefits offered by your GIS system. The choices you make regarding data storage impact how you can access, edit, validate, and secure your GIS data. These choices also impact the performance and scalability of the GIS system. Therefore, it is crucial to make good decisions about how and where you store your GIS data.

Storage Architectures

The ArcGIS Enterprise platform offers various data storage architectures including ArcGIS Data Store, cloud storage, and enterprise databases. Each configuration supports certain use cases which can provide the best fit for a given category of business needs.

The five main categories of data storage as follows:

• Files and folders,
• Enterprise geodatabases,
• ArcGIS Data Stores,
• Cloud storage, and
• Big data storage

On one hand, from the end-user perspective, the GIS system users don’t care where the GIS data is stored, so long as they can easily and quickly find and access what they need. On the other hand, the system and database administrators do care about how and where the GIS data is stored and how it is accessed. The key considerations when deciding what format data should be stored in are whether it provides adequate ease of access and performance to facilitate the desired workflow, deliver the expected benefits, and support the business goals.

Business Gaols Drive Choice of Architecture

To get a good understanding of how GIS data is going to be used within an organization you need to start with the business goals. These goals drive why the GIS system is being implemented. You should strive to create a data strategy or comprehensive plan for how the GIS data will be collected, stored, accessed, managed, analyzed, and shared. You should then ensure that your data strategy is feasible, integrated, and tailored to your system’s workflows, users, and target audiences. It is important to realize that your data strategy is a living document that will evolve and therefore it should be reviewed and updated regularly.

Evolution of Storage Architectures

Over the years the evolution of GIS software has driven the evolution of GIS data storage architectures. Today, because of the many developments in GIS technology, there can seem to be an overwhelming number of different data formats.

The ArcGIS family of products started as a single-user desktop system. This evolved into a system which could share data between users via the multiuser geodatabase.

The ArcSDE technology allows such multiuser geodatabases to be layered on top of a standard RDBMS database system. The RDBMS acts as the shared data store accessed by all users.

Next, core functionality was packaged in the ArcGIS Server as shared web services which can be accessed via an url (web address). This enabled the functionality to be integrated into other systems and accessed by a wider group beyond just the users who create and edit the GIS data.

The specific details of how you store your data also depend on the type of content. Esri offer specific solutions optimized for feature and attribute data, raster data, and spatiotemporal data. For example, feature data can be stored as feature datasets in a shared geodatabase. Massive collections of raster data can be stored as mosaic datasets in a raster datastore and served to end users via the ArcGIS Image Server.

In a similar way, spatiotemporal data can be stored in a big data store and served by the ArcGIS GeoAnalytics Server.

Most recently, ArcGIS Online has enabled “web GIS. ” This product has allowed GIS data to be shared with an even wider audience. It is the advent of web GIS that has made this data more accessible and easier to use by many more users. I think it is a little bit of an exaggeration, but the presenters in the video claim that ArcGIS Online now enables anybody to create a map. The increasing openness and ease of use offered by ArcGIS Online have allowed broader audiences to engage with GIS data. This is why ArcGIS Online considered a system of engagement.

Conclusion

The Esri system architecture built from the various layers and a confusing array of server products. Because these products have evolved over time, they now seem present an overlapping and somewhat confusing landscape.