Over three hundred Esri Data Interopability Scripts comprised of over 36,000 transformers and a lot of late nights helped move over 20 million water utility features between 40 databases. As part of a data migration effort within American Water, Magnolia River Services GIS Team leveraged the Data Interoperability Extension to automate complex mapping between legacy and updated water network enterprise databases. The resulting scripts cut the data migration time down to under 20 hours.

1. Lift and Shift:
Moving features
with ArcGIS Data
Interoperability
Magnolia River

2. Who are we?
Magnolia River is a provider of
engineering, inspection, and GIS
solutions for utility & pipeline
infrastructure & operations.
We are located in North Alabama with
offices in Florida, Texas, Missouri,
Louisiana, North Carolina and Michigan.

3. The Challenge
We needed to move over 2 million features
from 26 databases into a standardized
database model.
There were more than 25 different state
projections that needed to be converted into
Web Mercator

4. Our Process
● Created a new schema to
incorporate core features and
attribution across all
databases.
● Divided the FME work into 3
groups based on existing
datasets (Water, Wastewater,
and Staging)
● Created a base script for each
database to be converted and
adjusted as needed for specific
requirements of each
database.

5. The Results
● Crafted 339 individual data interoperability scripts and 36,452 transformers
within the scripts
● Performed complex mapping between source to target features and
attribution values
● Migrated 20,201,956 features from existing SDE databases and SAP to new
SDE databases
● Migrated from 26 different databases to 14 standard databases
● Reduced the overall database size from 80GB to 22GB
● Reduced the number of feature classes from 4,810 to 1,314
● Reduced the number of feature datasets within each database from 9 to 4

6. Lessons
Learned
● Parameterize as much as
possible
● Incorporate Python where
needed
● Run pre processing scripts
where needed
● Test, Test, Test

7. THANK YOU!
www.MagnoliaRiver.com