Chief Executive’s Department

IA Users Conference

Rochdale

Monday 13th February 2012

Facts About Coventry – a salutary

tale of over-ordering

2012 UpdateOur Current Standard Data View for Coventry

http://ias.facts-about-coventry.com/IAS/dataviews/report/fullpage?viewId=75&reportId=147&geoId=7&geoSubsetId=199

Same for Sub-region

http://ias.facts-about-coventry.com/IAS/dataviews/report/fullpage?viewId=75&reportId=181&geoId=7&geoReportId=11210

JSNA Databook

http://ias.facts-about-coventry.com/IAS/dataviews/report/fullpage?viewId=396&reportId=243&geoId=38&geoReportId=9732

2012 UpdateArea Profiles and Bespoke Geographies

http://ias.facts-about-coventry.com/IAS/dataviews/report/fullpage?viewId=273&reportId=185&geoId=7&geoSubsetId=199

Double Maps for Business Improvement

http://ias.facts-about-coventry.com/IAS/dataviews/report/fullpage?viewId=359&reportId=236&geoId=7&geoSubsetId=199

2012 UpdateRadar Charts and IMD 2010

http://ias.facts-about-coventry.com/IAS/dataviews/report/fullpage?viewId=232&reportId=232&geoId=7&geoSubsetId=199

A salutary tale of over-ordering at the OCSI all-the-data-you-can-eat buffet

At last years’ conference I spoke about how we’d used some cash from a soon-to-be-defunct local QUANGO and bought a complete set of OCSI data-packs.

Our system which includes these and our own uploaded indicators now has 6,913 indicators and goodness-knows how many instances

An insightful questioner from the floor asked if we thought this was excessive – my answer was that it’s not the amount of indicators in the database that’s at issue but the numbers you choose to use for a dataview – you just need to be sensible about it.

A salutary tale of over-ordering at the OCSI all-the-data-you-can-eat buffet

So, what do I go and do….. – the following slide is a screen-shot

WARNING – DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME

A salutary tale of over-ordering at the OCSI all-the-data-you-can-eat buffet

Let’s give it a whirl….

http://ias.facts-about-coventry.com/IAS/dataviews/report/fullpage?viewId=290&reportId=181&geoId=7&geoReportId=11484

A salutary tale of over-ordering at the OCSI all-the-data-you-can-eat buffet

This dataview has

•20 indicators

•1,000 LSOA’s

•4 comparator areas

•32 date points

This dataview is an XML file 15 MB big

The Internet pipe at Coventry City Council serving 5,000 odd users is 40 MB big

A salutary tale of over-ordering at the OCSI all-the-data-you-can-eat buffet

This led, at best, to slow loading of certain dataviews and at worst dataviews timing out.

We blamed in turn our Server Provider and Geowise for this.

Turns out we were seriously over-ordering

A salutary tale of over-ordering at the OCSI all-the-data-you-can-eat buffet

All is not lost though…

Geowise trouble-shot our system and made recommendations for improvements in speed – largely by adjusting time-out settings in the software itself and by introducing Indexing – but this has some serious ramifications and should not be entered into without consulting Geowise first.

A salutary tale of over-ordering at the OCSI all-the-data-you-can-eat buffet

I’m left with the sage-like advice of Pedro Thompson Melo of Geowise ringing in my ears…

“However, this does not mean you should then go back to creating gigantic data views: it merely means you will be able to have larger quantities of XML generated within a shorter period and, possibly, avoid the current timeouts. The point being that even if this works now, if you keep pushing the size of the data view up, you will, eventually, encounter the same problem.”