TABLE OF CONTENTS During the planning process, a great deal of consideration should be given to the database application that will manage the geotechnical data. An unwieldy or unsuitable database application will make it extremely difficult to provide the flexibility and data-specific features that geotechnical data require.
Unless a company has been operating in a complete technological vacuum, there will undoubtedly be some sort of DBMS already installed and used for other sectors of the business. Commonly, this will be for financial and/or engineering data management, but these systems may not be suitable for geotechnical data. While the temptation is great to use the existing system to take advantage of the economies of scale, several factors should be considered. These factors include flexibility (in terms of modifications and customization), the ability to link to geotechnical interpretive applications, and the ability to load and use a geotechnical-specific data model.
If an existing system is being considered for use with geotechnical data, it may require a certain amount of customization and modification so it can fully handle the specific types of data and user requirements planned. Also, if the system is primarily used for handling small, manageable, and relatively static volumes of data, it may not have the capacity to handle the potentially large volumes of geoscience data.
In most cases, it will be possible to determine an approximate value for the current storage capacity requirements and data processing speeds needed to handle existing data volumes and user...
