While attending the Birds-of-a-Feather session for EPDM at SWW11 and interesting topic was discussed about performance and how you structure your files within EPDM. The premise of the comment was to think strongly about how you index your files in EPDM.

For instance, we currently have a PDMWorkgroup vaults that are arrange by Project Number. While we migrate to EPDM we just assumed that we would keep this arrangement as we are planning to use EPDM to store all of our Project related documents. The problem is (as you may have experienced) that as you increase the number of files in a folder your navigating experience quickly suffers. Each time you select and open a folder you are querying the database server and collecting all the folder's children.

The suggestion was to index your files by their part number - in our case our filenames are an 8 digit partnumber (12345678.sldprt) and ensure good distribution by indexing on the last three digits. Thus:

               678.sldprt>

               678.sldprt>

               679.sldprt>

My question is, how are you arranging your files in EPDM? What does SolidWorks recommend? What have you found to be the best way to optimize end user's navigating experience vs. performance.

I paraphased so if anyone from SWW needs to correct my interpretation, feel free.

Thanks,

Adam