Oracle Maps FOI server performance

Question

Hi,
We have a production application based on Oracle Mapviewer 10.1.3.1 and Oracle Maps accessible on Internet for our customers.
Sometimes our app shows several 100s of markers and it is like a lazy compared to some internet map applications I reviewed on Internet.
For example: if you click to this Google based solution: http://www.dsl.sk/map/index.php you will get several 100s of markers in just a moment.
Also go to http://www.mapy.cz and zoom in to Prague (PRAHA) to see a lot of markers (bus stops, theaters...) - its amazingly fast.
Our Oracle Maps application shows tiles quite fast but markers very slow.
Is there some other technique ? or Mapviewer performance is so poor?
thanks,
Branislav

Answer 1

Per our recent exchanges on this issue, there is clearly an architectural difference in how things are done typically in google vs oracle maps when dealing with FOIs (well mostly POIs for google maps). In this case with google maps, all the points (their location and associated attributes) are readily available and probably stored as flat files on the web server. The application gets these point data via a simple http GET and then creates/adds all the markers on the map via a client side JavaScript loop. Now if your application has similarly readily available data it can simply use oracle maps to display them as Individual FOIs which are client side generated markers (similar to the google maps approach). This should give you comparable performance.
However typically with oracle maps, our customers run complex SQL queries in the database which then generate result data sets that contain location information plus all the associated attributes. So here the data sets are highly dynamic and not readily available. Often the most time consuming part is the loading/fetching of the result data set from the database to the mid-tier via JDBC, as is the case with your application.
Now there are definitely workarounds like the one I suggested which is to pre-cache all the location-only data in the MapViewer's memory, run the query to get only the business side of data (which has a much smaller footprint compared to spatial result sets). Then use the concept of Non-Spatial Data Provider to join the two data sets in the mid-tier (which is very fast) and display all the FOI images. Sure there are also improvements that can be made in other areas such as better client side handling of large number of FOI/POIs and other optimizations, which we are doing in 11g and I have been testing maps where we are able to display 3000+ POIs on the map within a few seconds.
thanks
LJ