Formula Queries

Question

Has anyone implemented a lot of formula queries (100+) in their app?

I have only implemented about 20, and I love them, but am afraid of performance issues. I am wondering if anyone has used a lot - if so how many, are they on large tables, and are you having any performance issues?

I could make 1000 to help me if I wasn't worried about performance, but I don't have any concept of what is 'a lot' of formula queries.

Is 50 a lot? is 500 not very many? Are they expecting users to have 1000 formula queries or 20?

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Mike Tamoush
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markshnier__you · Answer

I think that is not really a question which is directly answerable. If you had just one "pain causing" formula query and you had 100 users on a report that relied on that formula query and they were hammering at those reports all day then yeah it's going to slow down the app.

Or if you had 100 different formula queries on 100 different reports and 100 different users were using their own report that would be the same amount of load.

ie, a dormant Formula Query does not hurt performance, it only causes load when Quickbase finds that it needs to recalculate the result to display a report or a record.

I don't know if you have one app or many apps but you probably have a sense of your app performance just by working with the app and seeing how responsive it is. If the app is starting to slow down and you have a high enough plan level there are some tools available from QuickBase performance experts which can rank what are called long requests. If I recall correctly, a long request is one which takes more than five seconds.

My inclination would be to do what you gotta do to create an app which is user-friendly. If you do start to run into performance issues you dig into specifically which reports or dashboards are causing that performance issue and only take a step back and rethink the approach if you are forced to for performance reasons.

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Mark Shnier (Your Quickbase Coach)
mark.shnier@gmail.com
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miketamoush · Answer

Gotcha,
So I am much safer creating queries that may be used in say, calculations that are not displayed anywhere, than if I had a large report with a formula query constantly updating and needing to display. Correct?------------------------------Mike Tamoush------------------------------

markshnier__you · Answer

Quickbase does the minimum amount of work required to process the request, like running a report or displaying a record. If there was no need to process a formula query to answer the request then that Formula Query caused zero load on the system.

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Mark Shnier (Your Quickbase Coach)
mark.shnier@gmail.com
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jeremymyer · Answer

I have a few formula Rich Text fields to created graphics which have many formula queries in them.&nbsp; I have found that if I add more variables/queries, I get an error "the way you've built this field will take too long to calculate" so there is some quick analysis being done on table size/# of queries (in this case the table being queried has ~600K records in it).&nbsp; But I don't know the limit.&nbsp; I'd say in this app I have close to 200 formula queries with no major slowdowns.&nbsp;&nbsp;I ended up resorting to using Power BI to give me what I want on these massive data sets.&nbsp;&nbsp;------------------------------Jeremy Myer------------------------------

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Formula Queries