Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 4. Optimizing Geodatabases
Modeling the geodatabase in the previous chapter helped produce a cleaner schema and re-
duced future maintenance costs. It was a necessary step to ensure a proper design, which in
turn contributed directly to optimizing the geodatabase. As the geodatabase gets populated
with features, its performance will naturally decline. The more features you have, the great-
er time the geodatabase takes to execute a query. That is why, in this chapter, you will be
equipped with some new tools to help you tune the geodatabase to perform at its best.
Some tools will be used only at the time of creating the geodatabase, while you will need to
run the others frequently.
This chapter will run you through three themes. First, we will learn about indexing feature
classes and how this can help boost querying. Second, we will introduce the concept of
compressing, where we will learn how this can potentially reduce the size of the geodata-
base. Finally, we will learn how compacting works and help speed up queries for a fre-
quently edited geodatabase.
Note
Indexing is a feature that helps speed up data retrieval for an attribute or a collection of at-
tributes in a database table.
Compressing is a process by which the duplicated data in geodatabase datasets are simpli-
fied to decrease their size.
Compacting is a process by which a frequently edited geodatabase is cleaned from unused
and orphan records.
