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Ask Me Anything about Quick Base Performance

EvanMartinez's avatar
EvanMartinez
Moderator
6 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 6 years ago
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  • JonathanHeuer's avatar
    JonathanHeuer
    Qrew Cadet
    6 years ago
    Mark's "million records" use case is interesting. Obviously there are a lot of flavors when it comes to apps and tables. I have an app with a key central table with tens of thousands of records, but more complexity in relationships and # of fields than this example. It would be interesting for QB to post some other use cases. Perhaps this will happen during the Empower Oil Change session but I'm not able to attend. Will the sessions be posted this year, with video and ppts?
  • KyleNorthview's avatar
    KyleNorthview
    Qrew Member
    6 years ago
    I have been pretty happy with performance in Quick Base, our apps seem pretty speedy but there are definitely some specific times of day where my users tell me things are feeling slower as we have gotten bigger. Things have been a better lately but I've got my fingers crossed it will stay that way. I'm wondering what is causing this, and what kind of stuff are you planning to make it better or make it easier for me to figure it out?

  • HarrisonHersch's avatar
    HarrisonHersch
    Qrew Member
    6 years ago
    Hi Owen. Sorry you went through this. We continue to make investments under-the-hood. We have a lot to share about this at Empower and have also had a handful of improvements recently released.

    That being said, we are able to contribute to a fully scalable ecosystem. We put significant effort into this area. At the bottom of that article is a link to something our best practices team wrote on the best ways to share data. We see the most important part of preventing your situation as getting builders the right information early on in the process. The miss on our part was that you didn't have any of the information up front about cross apps and guiding principles around app structure.

    Cross apps are a powerful tool, but they force Quick Base to share resources because of our unique in-memory database architecture. So this is a trade-off we want to empower folks like you to make by having the right information to make educated decisions and we will be there to support you through the journey.


  • HarrisonHersch's avatar
    HarrisonHersch
    Qrew Member
    6 years ago
    Hi Jonathan. We will post sessions and audio records here: https://university.quickbase.com/series/empower but I don't think there will be video. We have a handful of sessions around performance/scale at Empower. We also will be doing a deep dive into how Quick Base works under the hood.

    We have tables with thousands of fields (though we wouldn't encourage that without discussing with us first). Are you looking for information on optimizing your current app?

  • HarrisonHersch's avatar
    HarrisonHersch
    Qrew Member
    6 years ago
    Hi Kyle. We offer a handful of tools to help you diagnose this. Here are a couple:
    https://help.quickbase.com/user-assistance/monitoring_performance.html
    https://help.quickbase.com/user-assistance/about_profiler.html

    We would encourage you to put in a support case with our Care groups. The more information you can provide us, the better. We can look at backend logs to see what is going on and make some recommendations to help you improve the app. For example, there may be opportunities to improve reports or form responsiveness.

    We also have a lot of content geared up for Empower. Will you be joining us? We even have a performance workshop where we will help you with your app live!


  • CharlieMurawski's avatar
    CharlieMurawski
    Qrew Cadet
    6 years ago
    One word answer = yes...BUT I could do a lot of good things with that feature just as an admin. I'm in more of the camp where I wouldn't dare let the above mentioned users manage an app BUT I understand that doesn't work for everyone. It would be cool to see that feature on custom columns for non-admin users so they can get that excel formula checking experience there.
  • QuickBaseCoachD's avatar
    QuickBaseCoachD
    Qrew Captain
    6 years ago
    One quick tip is to ensure that you do not have apps that needlessly paint a bunch of fancy charts and summary reports on the table home page.  Put those on a separate dashboard and provide a button to link to that dashboard.
  • ArtArt's avatar
    ArtArt
    Qrew Trainee
    6 years ago
    Will the calendar view on dashboard ever be available to view entire year at once?