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.
