Im reading in very large esri featureclasses but just need the geometrys, not attributes, It has 24 attributes that are read in with the geom. Is it possible to limit the reader to just bring in the geom not the attributes. Will this provide better reader speed/performance than using a attribute remover as my first transformer?. i was thinking of some sql in the reader "where clause" ?? thoughts/ suggestions , thanks Steve
If you want to give it a try, most of the database readers offer a "SELECT clause" option in the reader properties, where you can write your own selection.
If you're experiencing performance problems, I'd normally look at fine-tuning the writers first - your first writer is written on the fly, and some formats are relatively slow by default.
If it's data in a database (rather than a file Geodatabase) I suspect you could use a SQLCreator transformer to read in just the geometry column, and then a GeometryReplacer transformer to turn it into a proper feature. But I'm not certain it would work (will the GeometryReplacer recognize the geometry field content?) and you'd be bypassing a lot of probably useful functionality in the Esri Readers.
But really, those are just hunches. I can't think of a way to do this with a setting proper. As @rollo said, if you have performance issues then do check your entire translation. Usually the reading part is the least problematic.