[gis_info] ArcPy Cursors That Scale: Patterns for Real-World Geodatabases

[Eric Pimpler]

In the last article
<https://geospatialtraining.com/know-your-geodatabase-a-reusable-arcpy-inspection-script/>
we
built a script that inventories everything inside a geodatabase: feature
classes, tables, fields, domains, subtypes, and relationship classes.
Knowing what’s in there is the first step. The second is being able to read
and write all that data efficiently, and that’s where cursors come in.

Most ArcPy cursor examples online stop at the toy stage — open a
SearchCursor, print every row. That’s fine until you’re updating two
million parcels, your script has been running for six hours, and you’re
starting to wonder whether you should kill it or wait. Or until you write a
perfectly reasonable-looking update loop, run it on a versioned enterprise
feature class, and silently corrupt three weeks of edits.

Cursors are the workhorse of ArcPy. They’re also where small choices make
order-of-magnitude differences in performance and correctness. The patterns
that work on a 500-row sample geodatabase do not necessarily work on the
parcel layer for a county of 400,000 properties. This article covers the
cursor patterns that hold up on real data — what to do, what to avoid, and
the worked example that ties it all together.

Read the entire article.
<https://geospatialtraining.com/arcpy-cursors-that-scale-patterns-for-real-world-geodatabases/>


-- 
Eric Pimpler
President/Owner
Geospatial Training Services
215 W Bandera #114-104
Boerne, TX 78006
http://geospatialtraining.com
Twitter - @gistraining
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eric at geospatialtraining.com
210-260-4992
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