title: How to improve ESRI/ArcGIS database performance while maintaining normalization?
body: <p>I work with databases containing spatial data.  Most of these databases are in a proprietary format created by ESRI for use with their ArcGIS software.  We store our data in a normalized data model within these geodatabases.</p>
  
  <p>We have found that the performance of this database is quite slow when dealing with relationships (i.e. relating several thousand records to several thousand records can take several minutes).</p>
  
  <p>Is there any way to improve performance without completely flattening/denormalizing the database or is this strictly limited by the database platform we are using? </p>