GITA 2007 Feedback

One of the questions we were asked at GITA expanded on a common theme. “What do we have to do on the ArcSDE server to make GO! Sync work?” The quick answer is NOTHING!

GO! Sync was designed and has been implemented to be data model agnostic. This allows our users to synchronize, display and manipulate data and centrally manage their implementation regardless of the underlying ArcSDE data model. This design consideration is something that we are very proud of since it allows us to support all departments within an organization (Gas, Electric, Water, Wastewater, Police, Fire, Public Works, etc…) from a single solution.

When you add our single interface support for integration with work management systems, customer information systems, permitting systems, outage management systems, computer-aided dispatch systems and a whole host of other mobile workforce management business systems, you really begin to see the value of GO! Sync within your organization.

Other vendors have taken a different approach where the data-model is specific to a particular application, the workflow is virtually dictated, custom objects are required for the system to work, and upgrades and changes are expensive and risky to attempt. All this might make sense if you are dealing with a single commodity and have an unlimited IT budget, but it really hinders organizations that must support users in a multi-mode, multi-commodity environment on a limited budget with limited resources.

We think we’ve gotten it right, and we’d like you to give us a try.

Post GITA Thoughts

GITA 2007 is over and and I imagine that most people are now home. It was a good conference and although there are less attendees that previous years people are really starting to know what they need from GIS and the good news for Tadpole is that a bunch of people need Mobile GIS.

San Antonio is a great city to visit and to host the GITA conference. The conference hall itself is nice (although it will be good when the construction is complete).

There are plenty of Hotels, restaurants and bars for people to relax at night in.

.NET Framework and GO! Sync

One of the first tasks that we at Tadpole have to do when installing GO! Sync is make sure that the .NET Framework support is added in ArcGIS before we install GO! Sync.

A very good article on how to check this and what to do about it has been posted here.    

Logging in all GO! Sync software

Any client that has started to look deeper into the inner workings of GO! Sync will realize that the $data\MobileUploads\Logs folder on the Mobile GIS Server starts to fill up quckly and the files disappear as fast.

This is due to an extremely useful process that we have in place which logs information (Errors, General Information) about what is happening in all applications that make up the GO! Sync product line and stores then in a set of XML files on the client machine in the $data\Logs folder.  The contents of this folder are configured to be uploaded to the Mobile GIS Server when the client synchronizes so it never clutters the client machine. When the files arrive at the Mobile GIS Server within an organization they are then uploaded to Tadpole server in Carlsbad, CA!

As you can imagine the amount of files that we recieve gets interesting and to be useful they really need to be processed in some way. Tadpole have implemented a Windows service that takes the XML files and loads them into a SQL Server database. From this database we perform daily queries for errors and occasionally use it try and find out why a mobile device is having problems.

I mention this is it is something we have in all our products and have found it so useful that it is here to stay.

Performance Tools

Overview

Something that has been utilized but Tadpole in most implementations but not advertised all that often is Performance Tools. Performance Tools exists as in the early days of field deployment using ArcGIS 8.x products (over 5 years ago now!) Personal Geoadatabases (pGDBs) suffered from performance problems (searching, drawing etc etc) when dealing with databases that where 800Mb and higher.

This is a combination of a bunch of data within the pGDB for ArcGIS to look through but also the burden being put on the hard disk as information next to each other in real life – poles running down a street holding up a primary line – would not necasarilly be next to each other on the hard disk. This resulted in the hard-disc being ‘thrashed’ when it had to draw an area on the map.

The problem also manifests when opening a Map Document (MXD) as ArcGIS needs to grab all of the information it can to draw the map resulting again in the hard-disc bein ‘thrashed’.

Performance Tools was designed and implemented to solve this problem and it’s whole goal is to spatial order the data contained within feature classes. In order words, place things that are next to each in real life next to each other on the disc.  

Metrics

The gains from doing this are wide and varied as it depends on the:

• Size of the data
• Have fragmented the dataset is
• The makeup of the data (believe it or not datasets that are square perform better to the the way that spatial indexing works in the Geodatabase!)
• The hardware that the Geodatabase is being used on.

That said, on average Geodatabases that have had Performance Tools run on it seem to run about twice as fast as that of a Geodatabase that has been extracted using GO! Sync (Extractor) or ArcCatalog.

Usage

Performance Tools has it’s main benefit is the first time that it has been run on a Geodatabase but when updated using Incrmental Updater it can get fragmented again and Tadpole recommend that the Geodatabases are spatially defragmented on a regular basis. This not only helps performance but the process also compresses the database which helps with file size.

Performance Tools can be implemented alongside incremental updater or as a process run after ‘The Extractor’ has extracted the Geodatabase.

Conclusion

Performance Tools is a valuable mechanism for performing perdiodic maintenence on the Geodatabases received by the field clients. It helps with performance and keeping the Geodatabases smaller and maintainable.

If this is something that you wish to discuss with Tadpole then please contact support@us.tadpole.com, your account manager or the business partner that implemented GO! Sync. 

GITA 2007

It’s almost time for this years GITA Conference and a few others from Tadpole and I will be attending and exhibiting. Our booth number is 322.

Anyone that wants to hang out and chat about things then please drop me an email and we can arrange a time.