Law Enforcement Software
Law Enforcement Software
System Capacity - How much disk space do I need ?
Most Crimestar RMS tables utilize a relatively small data record. The physical size limitation of any single Professional Edition CrimeStar RMS table is 2 gigabytes. Remember the CrimeStar database consists of numerous tables. Therefore the storage capacity of any given table is 2 gigabytes divided by the size of the data record. For example the Incident module main data record is approx. 530 bytes long. This means that the number of records that this one table can hold would be 3.7 million. (2,000,000,000 / 530 = 3,773,584). The actual disk space required for an Incident and many other CrimeStar data records depends largely on the number of people, vehicles, property and other associated or linked information, which is associated to a main data record. A complete incident for example is actually made up of one record in the incident table and zero or more records in the incident names table, zero or more records in the incident vehicles table etc.
In order to project the amount of disk space required by CrimeStar we will make some assumptions. Lets assume that the average incident report names two people, one vehicle and 5 articles of property. Our formula would be as follows;
Main Incident Record 530 bytes
Incident Names (590 bytes x 2 people) 1,180 bytes
Incident Vehicles 327 bytes
Incident Property (859 bytes x 5 articles) 4295 bytes
Allow 1168 bytes for associated free form comments and text.
The total disk space required for our assumed ‘average’ incident report is (530 +1180 +327 +4295 +1168 ) 7,500 bytes . Most small and medium size agencies process less than 10 thousand incident reports per year. This means that we can project the disk space required to store incident records is (7,500 bytes x 10,000) or 75 megabytes. Your actual requirements may be more or less than this estimate.
Likewise the number of Calls For Service or event records which are handled by an agency most of which do not result in an incident report being generated is considerably greater in number. Let’s assume that the average number of Calls For Service records is 100 per day. This would be 36,500 records per year. The estimated record size for a Calls for Service record is 560 bytes. This means that the disk space required for 1 years worth of Calls For Service records would be (36,500 x 560) 20.4 megabytes. Therefor 5 years of data at this level of volume would only be 102 megabytes of disk space
With disk space currently being measured in the Gigabytes (or thousands of megabytes) a relatively modest amount of disk space can accommodate a small or medium sized agency for quite a while. Understand that as a general rule you should double or triple what you think you will need. The insertion of lots of text or comments, digital images etc. can cause database table sizes to grow rapidly.
Archiving Data- Storing data off-line
Currently the CrimeStar system does not have any data archiving functions although these types of functions when required will be provided as part of the software. . In the early days of computing when disk storage cost thousands of dollars per megabyte, the concept of archiving was a major consideration. The cost of keeping data on-line was often cost prohibitive, and every byte counted. With today’s rapid decline in the cost for disk storage capacity, it is not unrealistic to plan on keeping all your data on-line.
Performance - The speed of your system
The performance of all database applications is directly affected by the amount of data in the system, which must be searched and sorted by the database engine. CrimeStar is no exception. As the capacity of the database tables grow you may notice a decrease in performance.
While there are some thing you can do on your desktop (client) computer to increase performance (see: How to optimize system performance)The most significant consideration overall is the movement of data across the network. CrimeStar retrieves data from the file server and moves it across the network to the client workstation computer where it is sorted and presented to the user. The speed and congestion level of the network usually proves to be a single most significant performance bottleneck in system performance. To this degree faster Gigabit network controller cards can provide significant performance improvements Fast hard disk drives and lots of memory on the file server can help to minimize wait time and contentions at the file server.