What type of maintenance is needed for a geodatabase?

There are a number of geodatabase maintenance tasks that must be performed on a regular basis. Most of them are standard maintenance you would perform for any database management system (DBMS), such as database backups and regenerating database statistics. Others, such as compression and synchronizing geodatabase replicas, are specific to geodatabases. All maintenance tasks help preserve the database and its existing performance levels.

Following are some of the geodatabase maintenance tasks:

• Database backup and recovery—The data stored in your geodatabase must be protected from loss or corruption. To achieve this, the database administrator makes backups, periodic copies or snapshots of the database. The database administrator must also be able to use these backups to recover the data in the event of hardware failure or data corruption.
• Update statistics—As the data and components within the geodatabase change, table and index statistics become outdated. This is a problem because the database uses the statistics to process queries from users or client applications. For this reason, database statistics must be updated periodically.
• Update raster catalog footprints—If changes are made to the raster catalog outside ArcGIS, you must update the catalog footprints. To learn how to do this, see Updating your geodatabase raster catalog footprints.
• Compress versioned geodatabases—As edits are made to versioned geodatabases, the number of states and rows in the delta tables grows, slowing database performance. Compressing the geodatabase removes the states that are no longer referenced by a version and can move rows in the delta tables to the base table.
• Synchronize replicated data with parent geodatabase—If your site has field-workers or branch offices that work with replicas of the geodatabase, you will need to move the data into and out of the main database and manage the replicas.
• Upgrading the geodatabase—To take advantage of new functionality, you will periodically need to upgrade your software by either installing a newer version or installing a service pack or patch. After the software is upgraded, upgrade the geodatabase.