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What is ArcGIS Data Store?

ArcGIS Data Store is an optional component of ArcGIS designed to optimize publishing workflows to Portal for ArcGIS. By configuring Portal for ArcGIS with ArcGIS Data Store, you can publish thousands of feature layers to your portal, and you can publish cached hosted scene layers.

ArcGIS Data Store is easy to set up and configure. If you are not an expert with databases, ArcGIS Data Store provides you with a convenient, wizard-driven setup and configuration experience that creates two different data stores: one to store your hosted feature layer data, the other to store caches for scene layers.

As described in Configure a hosting server for your portal, you must define a hosting server with its own managed database to publish features to your portal. For example, when you create a map in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet using Esri Maps for Office, add a shapefile to the map viewer in the Portal for ArcGIS website, or publish a feature layer from ArcMap to your portal, you are publishing features, and the managed database is used to store all this feature data. Essentially, ArcGIS Data Store is an optimized managed database for your portal.

With ArcGIS Data Store, you can do the following:

  • Publish large numbers of hosted feature layers.

    If you plan to support publishing large numbers (thousands) of feature layers to your portal, it is strongly recommended that you use ArcGIS Data Store. Hosted feature layers that rely on the built-in data store that ArcGIS Data Store provides require a smaller memory footprint to run, making it possible for you to publish many services with less hardware resources.

  • Have backups of hosted feature layer data created automatically.

    Backups ensure you can recover your feature data in the event of a disaster such as data corruption or hardware failure. You can control when and where to create backups of the data store.

  • Configure a failover data store for your feature layer data.

    ArcGIS Data Store allows you to set up two data store machines. Your data is replicated from one (the primary) to the other (the standby), so if the primary machine crashes, the standby machine can take its place with minimum downtime.

  • Publish hosted scene layers to your portal. (New in ArcGIS 10.3.1 Data Store.)

    If your portal's hosting server is registered with ArcGIS Data Store, you can publish multipatch data as hosted scene layers from ArcGIS Pro 1.1 or later releases. The caches created for hosted scene layers are stored in a separate database in ArcGIS Data Store. For more information on publishing hosted scene layers, see Publish scenes in the Portal for ArcGIS user help.