Welcome to another edition of What’s Up Wednesday. 

Knowledge Content Revamp

Thank you to those who submitted article suggestions for our Experts to revamp yesterday during our first annual (maybe quarterly) Knowledge Content Overhaul. Stay tuned for the updates to go live. All of the articles that were updated to 2020 or 2021 will be highlighted here in What’s Up Wednesday as they become available. If you didn’t get a chance to submit a suggestion, you can still do so at http://fme.ly/ArticleReporting.

Technovation Girls BC 

Technovation Girls BC is a free technology-based program for girls ages 10-18 in British Columbia. Working in teams, girls are tasked to solve a problem using mobile app development, developing their collaboration, problem-solving, and leadership skills. Safe Software has been a sponsor and mentor for this program over the years. We recently published a video of encouragement from some of our female developers, check it out! 

Data-Aware Transformers

If you’ve seen this post on Data-Aware Transformers in 2020.1, you’ll be happy to know that we’ve also added the AttributeManager for 2021.0! Download a beta and try it out. 

Upcoming Webinars

Newly added to our list of webinars is an Ask Me Anything About Excel which will be held on February 3rd. So come ready with all of your Excel questions. The Tutorial: Getting Started with Microsoft Excel series has also been updated for 2020.1, so work through that to get your questions flowing. Don’t forget about the Data Integration Trends Businesses Should Watch for in 2021 webinar that is happening next week on January 20th. 

Upcoming Training

Integrating your Data with the FME Platform starts today and goes until tomorrow. It is not too late to sign up. On February 17th, you can participate in the Getting Started with the FME Platform course

FME & Performance

We always pride ourselves in stating that every release will be faster than the last. Well, that’s true in our tests, we want to ensure that your workspaces live up to the claim as well. For more details on FME and Performance, check out this article. In the meantime, here are 5 ways to increase FME’s performance (in no particular order): 

1. Disable Feature Caching: Performance can take a huge hit when feature caching is enabled, especially with rasters, point clouds or large datasets. If you need to use feature caching with these types of datasets, add a Sampler transformer at the beginning to reduce the number of features.
2. Limit What is Read In: Only read in what you need for your workspace. If your dataset allows for it, use a WHERE clause to limit what is read in. 
3. Reduce Attributes: FME holds data in memory or cached to disk during a translation, the earlier you can remove unused attributes, the faster the workspace will run. 
4. Minimize Redundancies: Transformers offer complex functionality, if set up correctly a single transformer can complete many tasks. Try to set up your workspace to use as few transformers as necessary. 
5. Utilize FME Server: If you have a large workspace, potentially splitting it into several smaller workspaces and running them simultaneously on separate engines in FME Server will complete the jobs faster.