All editors reconcile and post their versions daily. Other users create read-only versions for analysis purposes, so they do not reconcile and post…

The steady performance degradation is caused by the unreconciled read-only versions. In a versioned geodatabase, each version maintains a lineage of database states back to its creation. The nightly COMPRESS operation can only remove states and associated delta table records that are no longer referenced by any version's lineage. Because the read-only versions are never reconciled, they hold references to very old database states. This prevents the COMPRESS operation from cleaning up the state tree and moving records from the delta (A and D) tables to the base tables. Over months, this leads to an increasingly large and complex state tree, which severely degrades query performance for all users. Reconciling these versions updates their lineage to a more current state, allowing COMPRESS to be effective.

B. Create a database view: This is a data access method and does not resolve the underlying geodatabase maintenance issue. A view on the versioned data would still suffer from the poor performance.

C. Disable editor tracking: Editor tracking adds minimal overhead to edit operations. It is not the cause of the systemic, long-term performance degradation described, which is characteristic of versioning maintenance issues.

1. Esri ArcGIS Pro Documentation, "The geodatabase compress operation": "The compress operation removes unreferenced states and their associated delta table rows... A state is part of a version's lineage if it is the state the version was created in, the state the version is currently pointing to, or any state in between." This confirms that unreconciled versions prevent states from being removed.

2. Esri ArcGIS Pro Documentation, "Versioning scenarios": In the section on long-term projects, it is noted that "long-term versions can lead to a deep state tree, which can affect performance." The scenario describes long-lived, unreconciled versions which have the same effect.

3. Esri White Paper, "ArcGIS Versioning Best Practices" (July 2012), Page 6, "Compressing the Geodatabase": "It is important to understand that long-term versions can have an impact on the performance of the compress command... The compress command will not be able to compress any states in the direct lineage of the version." This directly links long-term (unreconciled) versions to compress ineffectiveness and performance issues.