Modeling the geodatabase in the previous chapter helped produce a cleaner schema and reduced future maintenance costs. It was a necessary step to ensure a proper design, which in turn contributed directly to optimizing the geodatabase. As the geodatabase gets populated with features, its performance will naturally decline. The more features you have, the greater time the geodatabase takes to execute a query. That is why, in this chapter, you will be equipped with some new tools to help you tune the geodatabase to perform at its best. Some tools will be used only at the time of creating the geodatabase, while you will need to run the others frequently.

This chapter will run you through three themes. First, we will learn about indexing feature classes and how this can help boost querying. Second, we will introduce the concept of compressing, where we will learn how this can potentially reduce the size of the geodatabase. Finally, we will learn how compacting...