UOP DBM384 Week 3 Discussion Latest

DBM384 Special Purpose Databases

Week 3 Discussion

Spatial Database Indexing

Includes 5 Long Answers to Discussion Question

Part of a Database Administrator's job is to ensure appropriate information retrieval performance of their databases. End users do not and in many cases can't wait for databases that perform slowly. This is true for many spatial databases. Consider Google Maps and the spatial data that this application stores and provides to its users. If it performs slowly, it would not provide useful driving directions. It has to perform well to be used. Slow database performance would make this application ineffective and could be dangerous or life threatening for the people who rely on it for driving directions.

From the perspective of a Database Administrator who is concerned about database performance, explain why indexing is so important when working with a spatial database.