Skip To Content

Geodatabases on Amazon Web Services

Geodatabases store spatial and nonspatial data. Geodatabases on Amazon Web Services (AWS) instances are intended to store data you are serving from your ArcGIS Server sites on AWS. You can use file, workgroup, or enterprise geodatabases.

Note:

Geodatabases in AWS instances are not intended to be accessed directly from on-premises ArcGIS clients.

Options are available in the ArcGIS Server Cloud Builder on Amazon Web Services to include enterprise or workgroup geodatabases with your stand-alone ArcGIS Server site. These geodatabases are intended for use as data stores into which data is copied at the time of publication or replicated and synchronized through a geodata service from your on-premises geodatabases.

To understand the data store options available when publishing data, see the following ArcGIS Server topics:

The following sections describe each type of geodatabase used with ArcGIS Enterprise on Amazon Web Services.

Enterprise geodatabases

When you launch a stand-alone GIS Server site using the ArcGIS Server Cloud Builder on Amazon Web Services app or one of the Esri CloudFormation templates and provide an ArcGIS GIS Server enterprise edition license, two geodatabases are created for you: egdb and geodata.

The egdb geodatabase is registered as the GIS Server site's managed database. When you publish feature or WFS-T services to a site that has a managed database, the data can be copied from the geodatabase that contains the map source data to the egdb geodatabase. This data is dependent on the service; when you delete the feature or WFS-T service, the data is deleted from the egdb geodatabase.

If you publish an editable feature or WFS-T service, clients can connect to the feature service to edit the data.

Data copied to egdb when feature service published

The geodata geodatabase is intended for use as a replicated geodatabase. You can register the geodata geodatabase with the GIS Server site. When you do, designate the geodata geodatabase as a server database connection that is not the same as your publisher database connection (the publisher geodatabase being your on-premises enterprise geodatabase) and create a geodata service. You can replicate data from your on-premises enterprise geodatabase to the geodata geodatabase through the geodata service.

When you publish a feature or WFS-T service that includes the replicated data, edits made to the data through the feature service can be synchronized with the geodata service, updating the data in your on-premises enterprise geodatabase. Similarly, you can continue to edit your on-premises data and use the geodata service to synchronize those changes to the data in the geodata geodatabase.

Synchronize on-premises and cloud data through a geodata service

See About registering your data with ArcGIS Server in the ArcGIS Server help for more information on registering databases.

When you opt to include a database management system with your site created through ArcGIS Server Cloud Builder on Amazon Web Services or Esri CloudFormation templates, you specify whether to include it on the same machine as the ArcGIS Server installation or on a separate instance.

The following diagram shows a GIS Server site on AWS with ArcGIS Server and the database management system on the same instance, and two additional ArcGIS Server AWS instances that come online when CPU usage exceeds a specified threshold and go offline when CPU usage drops below a specified threshold:

and DBMS on the same AWS instance

If you anticipate that your services will require a lot of processing in the DBMS—for example, if you publish many geoprocessing services that use data in the geodatabases or you have editable feature services—you should create the database management system on an instance separate from the ArcGIS Server installation.

Note:

If you use Amazon Relational Database Service for SQL Server or PostgreSQL, the geodatabases are always created on a separate AWS instance.

The following diagram shows a GIS Server site on AWS with ArcGIS Server and the database management system on separate AWS instances, with two additional GIS Server sites on AWS instances available when CPU usage exceeds a specified threshold.

and DBMS on separate AWS instances

See Geodatabases in PostgreSQL included with ArcGIS Enterprise on Amazon Web Services and Geodatabases in SQL Server included with ArcGIS Enterprise on Amazon Web Services for more information on using an enterprise geodatabase with your GIS Server site on AWS.

Workgroup geodatabases

If you have an ArcGIS Enterprise workgroup edition license, you can use the ArcGIS Server Cloud Builder on Amazon Web Services app to launch an instance of the Esri Windows AMI or a template created from this AMI and include an instance of SQL Server Express on the ArcGIS Server instance.

The SQL Server Express instance (database server) comes with two geodatabases already created: egdb and geodata. As with the enterprise instance, the egdb geodatabase is registered as the GIS Server site's managed database. When you publish feature or WFS-T services to a site that has a geodatabase registered in this way, the data is copied from your source to the egdb geodatabse.

The geodata geodatabase is intended for use as a replicated geodatabase. You can register the geodata geodatabase as a database connection that is different from the publisher database connection and create a geodata service from it. Through the geodata service, you can synchronize data from your on-premises enterprise or workgroup geodatabase to the geodata geodatabase.

Workgroup geodatabases only support Windows authentication. Two operating system users are automatically added to the SQL Server Express instance as server administrators: Administrator and ArcGIS. Both logins are dbo in the egdb and geodata geodatabases.

See Workgroup geodatabases included with ArcGIS Enterprise on Amazon Web Services for more information on using these geodatabases on AWS.

File geodatabases

See File geodatabases used with ArcGIS Enterprise on Amazon Web Services.

Related topics