Case Studies : ZENRIN CO., LTD.

As more diverse information, such as a local restaurant or updated traffic information, is available online today, the need to access location-based information anytime and anywhere has grown. ZENRIN, the top Japanese map provider with more than 50 years history in the market, has shifted its core business from conventional maps to electronic maps, and its wide range of content includes data for car navigation systems.

"Electronic maps and content has become popular on the Internet, but are now expanding to video game and cell phone devices. It is important for us to provide highly detailed up-to-date map data to customers as quickly as possible no matter what the environment." said Mr. Haraguchi, manager of product development.

ZENRIN's Zi map software, first released for the Microsoft Windows platform in 1998, has sold more than 700,000 copies. Some examples of Zi's content includes the more than 10 million directories of data from the Yellow Pages, allowing customers to easily search for them either by telephone number, facility name, or other criteria.

In 2007, ZENRIN released Zi9, with support for advanced search for complex data. "Zi8 provided simple selection from pull-down lists. In Zi9 we added new search capabilities like full-text search." Mr. Haraguchi said. "The amount of content exploded, as local coverage expanded and more detailed information on the majority of points of interests we were facing difficulty in achieving higher search performance."

ZENRIN's search for a solution to achieve faster search in Zi10 led them to choose Hitachi Entier.

Entier is a fast, compact relational database that works not only on car navigation devices and mobile handset equipment, but also on personal computers. Entier delivers high-speed, lightweight and unique search capabilities in all of these environments.

"Entier provides very fast performance and produced the result that I wanted to see." said Mr. Matsuo, manager of Product Development. "Especially, I was impressed by the flexibility and the speed of the full text search. For example, when I typed 'Kyushu' (or San Francisco), it would also provide me other options like 'Kita Kyushu'. (or South San Francisco.)"

Besides Full Text search, Entier provides a comprehensive set of search functionality including Alias Text search and Incremental Text search. Alias Text search recognizes alternate options, for example a search for 'cafe' would also return listings for 'coffee shops'.

The Incremental Text search function guides the search, as Entier shows all the possible next characters as each character is entered. ZENRIN also found value in Entier's Spatial search, in which users can specify a specific searching range, such as 'within a 500 meter radius'. The Spatial search function can also return results in order of distance, for example closest to the destination, or parking lots on the left side of the driving route.

"A key reason we chose Entier over other options was that Entier provides not only the performance we looked for but also the rich search functions to help us respond to our customers' ever-growing requirements for better and faster search, and to put Zi ahead of our competitors." said Mr. Haraguchi.

ZENRIN's latest release, Zi10, containing the Entier database, was released in November 2007.

During the development of Zi10, ZENRIN appreciated Hitachi's exceptional technical support.

Mr. Haraguchi said, "We received prompt and effective support from Hitachi."

Mr. Matsuo added: "We received a lot of support and advice, such as a detailed knowledge of how best to design our database, the best way to develop efficient indexing and best practices for writing SQL statements from the Entier team. Moreover, the whole Entier team took a flexible 'can-do' attitude to our requests, and many of the capabilities we worked on with them will be feed backed in the future version Entier."

By adopting Entier, the performance of Zi10 was improved seven times over the previous version. Entier made it possible for ZENRIN to add Complex Text search with multiple keywords and sophisticated new searching functions with minimal engineering work at ZENRIN.

"In the past, we have had to rewrite all of our programs, including data structure and search logic, in order to add new functionality." Mr. Matsuo said. "Because of the way Entier works, we reduced the cost of writing code by two-thirds." Because Entier enables complicated Spatial and high-speed Full Text searches with simple SQL statements, complex search functionality could be implemented in a very short time, which saved ZENRIN a lot of development time, and provided for more time in testing.

Mr. Izumi recognized: "The effects this had on productivity -- reducing the amount of code that needed to be written by the application developers for these complex detailed capabilities -- enabled developers to concentrate on developing application functionality instead of search engine functions."