Ask Me Anything about Quick Base Performance

Moderator

7 years ago

We are excited to continue our Ask Me Anything series and to be inviting Harrison Hersch, a senior product manager here at Quick Base, to join us on the Community to talk about his work on Performance.

On Thursday, May 23rd, we'll host a live AMA (Ask Me Anything) featuring Harrison. Harrison will be here from 2-3 p.m. EST to answer any questions you have about what we have been doing in the last year to make performance a priority in Quick Base, how Quick Base is developing for even better performance in the future, or anything else you would like to know about Harrison and his work.

Was there something in our release notes in the last year that you find confusing or don't know how to apply to your apps? Are you curious what we mean by performance and how we think about efficiency in Quick Base? Is there something you feel is sluggish right now and you are curious if it is on the docket for change? Alternatively, do you have a success story to share on how Quick Base performance has helped you and your org?

You can start submitting your questions here in this Community thread between now and the event. Then Harrison will be in this community thread live to tackle them on Thursday!

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Published 7 years ago

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EvanMartinez

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<p>Welcome to my profile, I am Evan Martinez, a Product Marketing Manger here at Quickbase. I started out back in 2016 as a member of our Care team working directly with customers to troubleshoot apps and solve problems. After that I moved over to managing our community and devotde my time to working here in the community passing on those tips and tricks I have learned working in Quickbase and keeping it running. Now I am a Product Marketing Manager focused on growth here at Quickbase, specifically how do we help our customers feel confident and informed as they grow. <br><br>When I am not balancing marketing work and tinkering on Quickbase apps I am a voracious reader, an exuberant story teller, and cycling through way too many hobbies. I always have a few projects going and yet I can still blow an entire day with my nose in a book.</p>

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28 Comments

HarrisonHersch
Qrew Member
7 years ago
Thanks, Mark. Love this. I will tell you that for a "transactions" type of table like this, we have tables with way more than a million records. To your point, there are tables with 50mb performing slower than tables with 500mb+ due to the complexity involved with what the app is asking us to do.
HarrisonHersch
Qrew Member
7 years ago
I think you mean the users page when in an app, right? The new users page launched last year at an admin level is extremely fast and handles 10,000+ users very well. In short, we plan on replacing that page with a more modern version that can will handle far more than a few hundred users with ease.
HarrisonHersch
Qrew Member
7 years ago
Integrations in general are extremely tricky when it comes to performance. We have to tango with multiple things such simply server load as the other system's response time, API limits/pagination rules as well as our own. We are aware of some situations where there have been Sync issues with certain connectors and we have made improvements to those respectively. I'm going to ask someone to reach out to you to gather more details so we can look into this.
HarrisonHersch
Qrew Member
7 years ago
Hi Jenni. By themselves, Automations are performant and we have put significant effort into improving the infrastructure and scalability of those over the past ~6 months.

Since we use our own APIs as a best practice, we also have to consider the performance of the Quick Base app itself. That means designing the Automations carefully to not do something like add/modify/delete/copy huge amounts of records all at once while your application is heavily being used by users. While it is always good to design for performance, by and large, most people do not experience any performance issues in Quick Base, let alone in Automations.
HarrisonHersch
Qrew Member
7 years ago
Hi Erin. We are focused on performance of Quick Base applications for this AMA, but I would love to offer some insight.

Regarding the # of summary fields, I would suggest posting this on UserVoice (or voting if already there). We regularly have healthy debates about what we want to default for users. For those of you that want "# of..." automatically added, there will be many folks upset that we are cluttering their application! :). It is a common struggle and we try to root these decisions in experience, data and user studies.
For "Use New Experience", what are you referring to specifically? We generally offer newer experiences for a limited period before transitioning fully to the new. This is important to ensure the reliability, consistency and our ability to support the platform. If you are having an issue, please open a Care case so the teams can look into it. Note that we _are_ working on a new way to manage your experience preferences for things like this, but wouldn't have a way for example to keep or force all users to a legacy experience.
HarrisonHersch
Qrew Member
7 years ago
Yep! We will be talking about this a little at Empower. In short, we want to expose much of what you have mentioned here to realm and/or app admins.
HarrisonHersch
Qrew Member
7 years ago
Love this idea. We already added the dependency diagram and have thought about different ways we could expose what you are looking for. There are a handful of challenges that are on the list here:
Some admins do not want users to be able to see this. That means we will have to add a toggle, which introduces the concern of where that toggle goes. Form level? Table level?
Behind the scenes, we are smart enough to not recalculate certain things until needed (there is a lot that goes into this decision on the fly) and so displaying that calculation needs some work in those cases.
Would love to hear any other thoughts folks have on this.
CharlieMurawski
Qrew Cadet
7 years ago
I was assuming this would be/should be/need to be an admin function considering you'd likely want to not have any access restriction to data, fields, etc.. to ensure the step through is 'pure' in a sense. I was thinking leveraging dependency diagram would be a good start to do some kind of step through where I could pick some source record/data and see the results of each step/dependency.
OwenMacbran
Qrew Member
7 years ago
Last year I had several apps that were very unresponsive and I had to ask for help from several Quick Base engineers who required me to make some significant changes to my apps and several of my cross-app relationships that I created. Are you planning anything that will help me avoid these kinds of situations in the future? Having to rework my apps to remove those relationships was not easy and took up more time then I liked.
HarrisonHersch
Qrew Member
7 years ago
Aghh. Ok. So we have actually heard that users want this too, especially in finance/ops, similar to how those users interact with Excel and can step through the formula. I would also expect you would want this to work in _Test as Role/User_ as well?

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Ask Me Anything about Quick Base Performance