ResourceSpace is about to get even faster

21st July 2022

Over the last few months we've been working on some big, technical improvements under the hood of the ResourceSpace platform.

Funded entirely by Montala, these two major updates will significantly increase the performance of ResourceSpace for both search and general user experience, and are centred on prepared statements and metadata normalisation.

We are committed to ensuring our Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform is as secure, stable and as fast as possible, while we also want to ensure ResourceSpace is future-proof. What's more, both of these major updates are coming at no cost to our customers, and will have no impact on our DAM pricing.

Although these developments don't represent new features or changes to how you'll be using ResourceSpace, we're excited about how they'll impact user experience and the speed of the platform.

Let's take a closer look at these latest technical improvements which we're rolling out in version 10.0 from August.

Prepared statements

Your ResourceSpace portal is a database of digital assets, storing metadata, image collections, logs, user information and more.

It's a lot of data to manage, and this is where Structured Query Language (SQL) comes in.

SQL allows you to access and manipulate databases, and is the way queries are executed, data is retrieved, and records are inserted, updated and deleted within a database. Basically, if you're making changes in a database like a DAM, it's likely SQL is behind it.

As you can imagine, there's a huge number of potential executable queries in a database, and this can lead to a lot of complexity. This is why we've been working on moving our SQL code over to 'prepared statements'.

A prepared statement, in the context of database management systems and DAM, is used to precompile SQL code, separating it from data. They take the form of templates into which constant values are substituted during each execution. The benefits of prepared statements include:

• Greater efficiency
• Increased security

This update completes over a year of work behind the scenes. We've rolled out some of this development in the last couple of releases, but for v10.0 we're porting over the remaining (and bulk) of the improvements.

This has involved rewriting over 1,500 SQL statements to use prepared statements, and users will see quicker searches and a faster overall system, thanks to their much greater efficiency. This efficiency is because they can be used repeatedly without the need to recompile them each time.

Prepared statements will also significantly improve security, by reducing the risk of SQL injection attacks - one of the most common web hacking techniques that involves inserting a piece of code that could destroy your database.

Database normalisation

We've also been working on normalising our database, specifically how ResourceSpace stores free text metadata. The aim of this normalisation is to reduce data redundancy and improve data integrity.

The rollout of this update means free text metadata is now stored in the same way as fixed list metadata. This significantly simplifies your DAM database. Let's take a look at an example.

You have three resources that all have the name of the photographer in a free text metadata field. Previously, this metadata had to be stored and indexed separately for each resource. With this new improvement, ResourceSpace only has to index the field once, reducing the amount of indexing your DAM has to do by two thirds.

This will result in faster uploads and quicker searches, while it'll also be much easier for Montala to offer support.

Following these updates, we've been doing some testing to measure the performance improvements our users will be seeing.

A typical system with 20,000 assets saw an increase in search performance of between 2x and 8x, depending on the query type, which is a significant boost.

Want to find out more about how ResourceSpace can make your Digital Asset Management easier? Book a demo today, or request your free DAM portal below.