FME - Oracle Spatial to SDF

I just discovered an issue when converting Oracle Spatial data to SDF with FME. 

FME translates Oracle's NUMBER(1,0) to DECIMAL(1,0). In Oracle the column contains the following values: 0, 1, <null>. FME translates  value "1" as "-1e+031". One needs to change the data type in SDF file from DECIMAL to INT to avoid this issue.

FME 2014 SP4, 64bit

SDF file - column data type 

...value '1'' translated to -1e+031.

MapGuide / AIMS - performance, file access

We run AIMS on virtualized W2008R2 machines with 6 GB RAM. Most data displayed as maps comes directly from Oracle Spatial. Only for one job enabled Map industry model  we decided to export 40+ feature classes and views to an SDF file. File size is roughly 200MB.

In order to speed things up I created a RAM Disk on the server and did some performance tests:
- hard disk access (read/write) was already much better then on my physical machine
- depending on RAM disk driver and test performed read access was faster by up to factor 6 compared to hard disk access

Surprisingly moving the SDF file to the RAM disk did not help improving performance in AIMS/MapGuide. 

Conclusion seems to be that W2008R2 has already cached the SDF file and no further improvement is possible here. As the SDF file is used in all web mapping projects and layers based on file are visible by default I assume that the file will be cached all the time. 


Here are a few screenshots related to the testing:

- hard disk performance, local machine:

- hard disk performance, virtualized 2008r2 server

- ram disk performance, local machine (imdisk)

- ram disk performance, w 2008r2 (softperfect)

- AIMS/MapGuide performance test with sdf based map - sdf file on disk on virtualized w2008r2 server

- AIMS/MapGuide performance test with sdf based map - sdf file on ram disk on virtualized w2008r2 server

AIMS 2013