SDE Conversion
Broward County SDE
Conversion
In November of 2005, Broward County Property Appraiser's
office, (BCPA), located in Broward County, Florida entered
into a contract with Panda Consulting to provide design,
consulting, conversion and training services for conversion
from coverages to an enterprise geodatabase. Broward County
had a library of parcel coverages for its approximately
717,000 parcels. The conversion from coverages to SDE
geodatabase involved redefining their structure and
providing complete understanding to their staff of the
inner working of SDE. Critical to the success of this
installation was the transfer of knowledge to BCPA staff on
all aspects of SDE from the installation to conversion and
maintenance.
Database Design
The first step in the process involved a review of current
ESRI data structures and the benefits of each structure.
During that same meeting, Panda Consulting reviewed the
existing coverage structures and workflows. Panda then
developed a preliminary design and sent the design and
backup documents to Broward County for their review and
input. While the changes to the preliminary design are
minor, these changes reflect the ability to customize the
geodatabase to BCPA's concerns. Once final review was
complete, a small pilot project was loaded and extensive
testing was performed against the design to ensure the
efficiency of the design and applicability of all internal
structures. During this time, BCPA staff were diligently
working on identifying and correcting any conflation issues
(edgematching conflicts) and assembling a single coverage
that would be imported into the final SDE structure.
Installation of Software
Broward County was unique in their desire to implement a
system that utilizes the power of Oracle 10g and the
ability of SDE to control the spatial tables for the GIS.
Towards that end, they run Oracle and SDE on separate
servers and optimize the servers for the respective
processes. Panda Consulting developed an installation
script for SDE and assisted BCPA staff in the installation
and setup of the SDE software.
Importing of the Existing Data
Prior to the actual conversion by BCPA staff, Panda
Consulting worked through all procedures and developed best
practices for every aspect of the data import. By having
all import routines tested prior to the actual procedure,
BCPA was able to easily understand the most efficient
process and run through and verify the process successfully
many times.
Quality Control
Panda Consulting then assisted BCPA staff in the
development of quality control test ing procedures to
ensure all data was transferred with no loss of spatial or
attribute integrity. In addition final testing was
performed on the rules for creation and placement of
feature linked annotation.
Training
Finally, BCPA sent its seven mappers to Panda Consulting's
Palm Beach Gardens office for one day of training. This
training focused on the overall approach to parcel mapping
in an ArcGIS geodatabase. Since the training was workflow
centric and was conducted on their data, the mappers
successfully picked up the requisite skills to make this
transition and, with a few days of practice at their site,
are successfully mapping with no loss in productivity
during the transition.
