Rather than storing Domain Values in Binary or XML form within the sde.domain table, allow users to use the values of an SDE Table to propogate the Domain values. This would allow for standard normalization on databases and eliminate redundancy of Domains stored over several GeoDatabases.
I never understood why ArcGIS uses domains when it could just use tables from the underlying database. If your geodatabase is built on top of Oracle, then you should be able to just choose which table/field is the appropriate "domain" for the field you are creating. In this way, when you update the Oracle table in some other app, the changes can be automatically applied to the geodatabase (using versioning, etc. when necessary). The fact that ArcGIS uses domains means that ESRI now has to build all these tools in order to edit the domains and it's very difficult for other apps to have access to that data (even read access, nevermind write access).
In our SQL/SDE database we've made physical tables to store domain values in so the data can be used outside of ArcGIS. This was a great idea 6 years ago and still a great idea today!
Yes, oh yes. I do export my domains often to gdb tables so I can: document them through reports, check data against domains, compare databases, join them to dirty data to clean up values.
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