45 | | * Speeding up spatial indexing using PostGIS: !GeoNetwork uses a shapefile to hold spatial extents for searches that contain spatial queries eg. touch, intersect, contains, overlap etc. At present only the CSW service uses the spatial index for these queries, the web search interface uses boxes and !Lucene. The spatial index needs to be maintained when records are added and deleted through import, harvesting, massive delete etc. Unfortunately the shapefile is not efficient for this purpose as the number of records in the catalog goes over 40,000 odd. In particular as the mechanism for deleting extents from the shapefile uses an attribute of the extent and these are not indexable meaning that there is a considerable cost for maintenance operations on the shapefile. |
| 45 | * Speeding up spatial indexing using !PostGIS: !GeoNetwork uses a shapefile to hold spatial extents for searches that contain spatial queries eg. touch, intersect, contains, overlap etc. At present only the CSW service uses the spatial index for these queries, the web search interface uses boxes and !Lucene. The spatial index needs to be maintained when records are added and deleted through import, harvesting, massive delete etc. Unfortunately the shapefile is not efficient for this purpose as the number of records in the catalog goes over 40,000 odd. In particular as the mechanism for deleting extents from the shapefile uses an attribute of the extent and these are not indexable meaning that there is a considerable cost for maintenance operations on the shapefile. To support fast maintenance and search of the spatial index for larger catalogs, it was decided to adopt the !PostGIS implementation for the spatial index written for the geocat.ch sandbox by Jessie Eichar and to fall back to using a shapefile when the catalog is not using !PostGIS for its database. An option has been added to GAST to allow the user to specify PostGIS as the database and to build the spatial index table when the Database->Setup option is used. When GeoTools 2.6.x is adopted, we will very likely to also allow the spatial index in Oracle. |
| 46 | |
| 47 | The net result of these two fixes is much faster load, harvest, reindex and massive operations in GeoNetwork. For example, in one case doing a file system harvest of 20,000 records was taking 10-12 hours without these modifications. With these modifications, the harvest now takes approx 30 minutes. |