Regarding your concern about application management, be careful. Applications that have large numbers of tables often become very difficult to manage as well, especially if you have multiple workflows intersecting across the application. In my experience, limiting the number of applications in order to make application management easier tends to come back to bite you in the end.I would encourage you to really think about what workflows are being handled by your application and decide if any of these can/should live on their own. As Mark pointed out, performance is really going to be impacted by your use of cross-app relationships, cross-app imports, table sizes, and the size of data sets on these tables. Ease of management is going to be impacted by # of Workflows in a single app, # of Tables, # of Fields on each Table, # of User Roles, # of Forms/Reports on each table, # of Dashboards, etc. You can split disparate workflows into separate applications and still have access to common tables like Customers, Resources, etc by using Sync tables. In that scenario, management may actually be easier because you've got less complexity within a smaller application, rather than running the entire business from one app and trying to figure out how to add/modify a process without causing issues with others.------------------------------Blake Harrison - DataBlender.ioQuick Base Solution Provider------------------------------

Re: Apps, Performance, and Best Practice

8 Replies

MichaelTamoush
Qrew Captain
4 years ago
Austin - when speaking about app size for sandbox, does that include file attachments? If so, I'm dead in the water because we track assets (equipment) and have roughly 20,000 assets, each with about 5 pictures.....or 85 gigs worth of attachments. Without attachments, my apps are tiny.

Blake - when you mention workflows, what exactly are you referring to? Automations etc?

Mark - thanks for the tips. My largest table only ha maybe 20,000 records. I can see some tables growing but it will be many years I imagine until I even reach 100k in one table.

I have a couple massive (I think? I have no frame of reference) tables of 500+ fields. So far so good, except my main table I ran out of Dynamic Form rules, so i will have to take some time to clean that up and rethink some of the fundamental design to alleviate that issue.

I like to keep my user roles small, also for ease of management, but still need 6-8 roles. Which multiplied over three apps already starts to wear on the management.

Sounds like this can really have a list of pro's and cons each way.

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Mike Tamoush
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- MarkShnier__You
  Qrew Legend
  4 years ago
  Mike, on the roles issues, note that you can have users in multiple roles. That can help so you don't need to feel that you need extra roles for users who cross some boundaries.
  
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  Mark Shnier (YQC)
  Quick Base Solution Provider
  Your Quick Base Coach
  http://QuickBaseCoach.com
  mark.shnier@gmail.com
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  - MichaelTamoush
    Qrew Captain
    4 years ago
    I had no idea you could assign to multiple roles! Do you simply just add a second instance of the user in the app?
    
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    Mike Tamoush
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- MichaelTamoush
  Qrew Captain
  4 years ago
  Another question - I have one table that I have what seems to be an absurd number of report links (20ish). It's been a good way for my users to be able to view a lot of information in one place, but I suspect this is a bit tedious for QB? I've considered being very selective in which ones I actually display (which right now is all of them) versus just displaying a link. I suspect this helps the speed in which the record will load, but I am not sure.
  
  Right now, the record can be cumbersome to open in edit mode. However, I wonder if this is a browser limitation as when opened on a mobile device it's quite quick.
  
  Does anyone have any experience/tips/thoughts on report links?
  
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  Mike Tamoush
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  - MarkShnier__You
    Qrew Legend
    4 years ago
    Best practice 99% of the time is to set the form the way it defaults which is to have report links fields load the child tables separately and use Tabs for Desktop forms to allow Quick Base to present the form to the user with the minimum number of report link child tables populated. That takes a lot of load to say run 8 reports and maybe the user only cares about or two of those child tables at that moment. They would probably load fast in mobile because they only have to pull the data when you click to view the report.
    
    If you can put embedded reports in Tabs, then the system will not try to pull the report(s) unless the user clicks the Tab.
    
    Quick Base is single threaded for all basic operations, so if the form takes 3 seconds to populate then every other user is frozen until that form loads for those 3 seconds.
    
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    Mark Shnier (YQC)
    Quick Base Solution Provider
    Your Quick Base Coach
    http://QuickBaseCoach.com
    mark.shnier@gmail.com
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- BlakeHarrison
  Qrew Captain
  4 years ago
  Mike -
  
  By workflows, I'm referring more to individual business processes / departments. As an example, I have a client that buys mineral rights. They originally had a single application that managed all functions within the company. After working like this for a year or two they found that the single app approach wasn't scalable and adding new functions often caused problems in unpredictable ways. That app still exists in a legacy capacity, but we have moved many functions into individual applications dedicated to: Sales, Personnel, Commissions, Corporate Planning, etc. They even have a completely separate application they use for planning and managing their Quick Base development. Many of their applications have some commonality, such as Employees and Customers and this information is pulled in via Sync tables.
  
  On another note, your comment about running out of Form Rules on one of your forms tells me that you probably should consider breaking up that main form into multiple forms. Each user Role can have a different form for View, Edit, and Add and I would encourage you to take advantage of this feature. This will allow you to have fewer Form Rules on each form and ensure that they always work properly. Splitting these up, while it sounds like you'll just have more forms to manage, can actually make it easier and give you the opportunity to provide a better user experience tailored to a specific role.
  
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  Blake Harrison
  bharrison@datablender.io
  DataBlender - Quick Base Solution Provider
  Atlanta GA
  404.800.1702 / http://datablender.io/
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