Geocoding fast... and faster...

Question

How to make geocoding faster?

I have a Composite Locator with 6 locators within: Parcel down to County.

I use it to geocode 1.5 million records each week. It takes upwards of 15-18 hours to complete.

What can I do to improve the speed either within the locators or within the table being geocoded?

The only thing I can think of is to arrange/organize/index the table in some manner...

Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.

Keith

AndrewDecker · Answer

Can't emphasize enough how much it helps to sort your reference data, as I've learned over the past little while.  Sorting you input data seems to have an even greater impact on speed but both are well-worth the step.

AndrewDecker · Answer

I have 8 million address points for CA.  I have the zip locators that are used in my composite broken down my the first two digits of the zip code.  I apply a query to my input table in the composite to feed the records into the appropriate locator.

A little work, but got the locator searching 400k points from 8 million and performance improved greatly.

JoeBorgione · Answer

I found this Geocoding Blog entry that talks about ramping up the performance of address locators.

http://blogs.esri.com/dev/blogs/geocoding/archive/2011/02/09/tuning-a-locator-for-improved-performance.aspx

I'm working towards this. I'll touch base again with the results.

Keith- that's a great blog post; thanks for sharing it!