NBS Create – Performance enhancements

I've been blogging a lot about BIM over recent months – to add a bit of balance, this week I will be putting one post live each day about NBS Create.

We have recently been releasing more enhancements to NBS Create. It’s been a pretty busy year at NBS and as an R&D Team we have been splitting our time looking at fixes, performance enhancements and also new functionality. I've got a series of five blog posts that look at some of these enhancements. This is the first of these posts.

NBS Create is built on a complex relational database which we believe gives a level of information modelling never seen before in a specification product. In NBS Building when a user opens a work section, the code queries a single table in the underlying database “return all clauses with the id ‘F10’”. When publishing or viewing this information – the only option to the user is “show me the work section F10”.

In NBS Create this operation is far more advanced. Each system object has child performance and manufacturer product objects, these in turn have clause items with marked-up values. This allows the user to model a building in detail and link related objects to other BIM packages such as ArchiCAD and Revit. A well-structured data model allows a large amount of reporting and publishing flexibility from a single database – analogous to generating multiple drawings and schedules from a single geometric model.

Our developers and QA team have been working very hard this year to ensure that the software can offer this fantastic functionality but not at the expense of the performance/response of the product.

In our recent release, time savings of over 20% can be seen on all of the process intensive operations – opening a job, opening the system editor, publishing, creating milestones and comparing milestones. Update bars that show progress to the users have also been added, this ensures that the software not only is faster but it also gives good feedback when process intensive operations are taking place.

Figure 1 – Performance and feedback improvements throughout the software

Figure 2 – The large system is open ready in the system editor