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PostGIS Implementation Advice – SANZ / EarthWhere

Our Client

SANZ Corporation
September 2004
http://www.earthwhere.com/
EarthWhere is now marketed by SPADAC

Project Background

The SANZ corporation is a prominent supplier of imagery management software and systems. Their EarthWhere™ software combines high-performance image processing technology with advanced metadata management and process control – it has been deployed in numerous departments throughout the US government and military.

SANZ uses PostgreSQL/PostGIS as the spatial database back-end for their EarthWhere™ product. During development of a new release of EarthWhere, SANZ found that they were not getting acceptable performance from the database during some load tests.

Refractions' Solution

SANZ hired Refractions for advice on tuning their PostgreSQL/PostGIS database configuration and data model.

Refractions took a sample of SANZ data and queries, and created a performance profile of the application and query plans.
Using the performance profile, Refractions re-wrote some of the queries to use indexes more effectively, and suggested changes to the data model itself to speed up queries.
Refractions also provided advice on default configuration tunings to use when deploying the database on client hardware.

The Result

By implementing Refractions' suggestions, SANZ improved their system performance by a factor of ten for their new release.