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Dynamic Containers™: The Key To Superior Performance

Deployment Examples

The Coherent Networks Success Story: Coherent Network International (CNI) is a company that provides products and services for data integration and knowledge management to the telecommunications and utility industries. Their SmartMaps Solutions Framework enables customers to get a single view of the many pieces of disparate and often incompatible data that most organizations in those industries possess. These separate sources of data may be CAD drawings, inventories and schedules on paper, legacy databases on mainframes and ODBC accessible databases.

CNI’s object model groups metadata, state information, geospatial data and results of data validation in logical clusters. This hierarchy of related objects maps directly to Objectivity/DB’s container based storage hierarchy. For example, a query on a telephone pole’s location does not return just data about that pole but about all the objects that are spatially proximal to that pole including cables, wires and nearby poles and exchanges. This natural conceptual grouping of objects is put into a single container which makes the query extremely efficient and fast, since it is mostly restricted to searching through a single container. Adjacent map sections are mapped into containers of their own so that when you traverse across a section boundary, you also go to a nearby container.

A single customer may serve several different geographical regions and each region is mapped into an Objectivity/DB database. This distribution into the Objectivity/DB databases is a good physical and logical separation of data. This is a case where the database software component of the project was not treated as a black box at the design stage and the result has been a superior product.