Relational Database Performance for Multimedia: A Case Study

This paper describes the performance optimisation of a state-of-the-art relational database to more efficiently serve data for multimedia visualisations in the ViRMA prototype. We describe the baseline database and queries, along with two major optimisation steps that improve query efficiency, at the cost of slowing down dynamic updates. We evaluate the optimisations with a case study of a lifelog collection of 182K images, showing that the time to produce complex visualisations is reduced by orders of magnitude.