Tips to increase your database speed

As your geological datasets grow larger and GIM Suite data management capabilities become more dynamic, so grows the need for your data to be malleable and more accessible.

We’ve designed some GIM Suite features to specifically help you get quicker access to your data when you need it.

Tackling dataset bottlenecks with data caching

Database managers often face a common problem – as their datasets become larger and more complex, data interrogation, reporting and exporting functionality can all become considerably degraded. This creates frustrating bottlenecks in day-to-day workflows, reducing productivity.

Our GIM Suite data caching feature first appeared in the GIM Suite 2 release. It addressed these performance issues by taking a snapshot of live data sets on a regular basis, providing fast and efficient access to the data needed.

The Benefits

The biggest benefit? Performance bottlenecks are eliminated. Time-consuming operations, like pivoting out columns and computing complex derived fields, are run during the caching process. These can be scheduled to run when you don’t need to access your drillhole or sampling data (for example, overnight). By the time you do need the data, you can access it instantaneously from the cache table. This means no more waiting while complex queries are processed in the back end.

A further benefit of the data caching feature is being able to toggle between your live and cached data sets.

The Future

Since first appearing in the GIM Suite, the data caching feature has been continually improved and remains an important feature of GIM Suite 3.

It now includes support for the Project Permissions module, as well as more fine-grained scheduling options, allowing cached data sets to be updated throughout the day.

In the upcoming GIM Suite 3 release, we’ve added more performance improvements to data caching and created a simplified setup and configuration process.

Avoiding bloated databases to save time

Old tracking data that hasn’t been cleared can cause your database to become bloated. As Record Tracking tables grow larger over time we highly recommend they are cleared out on a regular basis.

We’ve improved the way old logs can be cleared from your database in the GIM Suite. This means it now takes you less time to clear out any pre-existing data tracking.

Additionally, your system resources usage is reduced when you only select the tables you want to apply Record Tracking. This means you only track tables of interest and leads to better, more efficient management of your database systems.

We strongly encourage our customers to start planning their upgrade to our next release, GIM Suite 3, to take advantage of the latest enhancements to their GIM software. Need help? Contact us and we’ll be in touch.

The GIM Suite 3 release is due early 2017.