Mike and all. Last week ESRI sent a Land Records Professional Services person to look at our parcel fabric. Since my last post we've tested 2 SQL server FGDB's each containing one each version of our fabric in both GEOMETRY and BINARY. We tested one-for-one edit tasks and recorded our results. Of course, you are all aware of the latency within GEOMETRY but I discovered that the fabric performs much better when it is autonomous in it's own DB. Also, Anna speaks rightly about DB maintenance.
Additionally, i recall the guy mentioning that 10.4 (DB & Desktop) is the last version that will be stable with BINARY. 10.5 was said to have possessed 2 bugs of which the fixes did not restore 100% stability. His advice was to skip to 10.6 for both server and desktop. Mike mentions above, moving to GEOMETRY in 10.5 should alleviate latency issues in editing. He did not see any problems with keeping a dataset within the 10.4 release as a production workspace until 10.6 is rolled out.
Here is the surprising this I learned: It was recommended that for near every fabric related task, one should create a version, execute said tasks (minor or extended edits, parcel migration or imports), reconcile and post, then delete and recreate a version for the next tasks. In multi-editor environments, we are reconciling and posting multiple times a day with daily compress, spatial index refresh and other tune-ups at DB level.
We're looking forward to adopting some of these best practices and seeing positive results.