Apps, Performance, and Best Practice
I prefer to have a very limited number of apps, as management can be come quite labor intensive, and I tend to find cross app relationships with some limitations or inconveniences versus staying with...
Forum Discussion
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.
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Blake Harrison - DataBlender.io
Quick Base Solution Provider
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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.
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Blake Harrison - DataBlender.io
Quick Base Solution Provider
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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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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
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
------------------------------- 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
------------------------------- MarkShnier__YouYes, a user can be in multiple rules and you just add them to the app multiple times. Of course a user just counts as a user so you don't pay twice for the user.Now if the user is in multiple Roles they will get the most permissions possible based on all the Roles they were in.However, If they are in multiple roles they cannot get the most dashboards possible :) They still can only land on one dashboard and see one set of tables (in case you hide some tables by Role UI).
When you look at the list of Roles you can drag and drop them up and down. The Roles which are highest up in the list will take priority as to which dashboard a user will land in. ie they will land on the dashboard based on the highest Role they are in based on that drag n drop.
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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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- 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
------------------------------- MarkShnier__YouBest 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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- 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/
------------------------------ - No it is just the size of the application and data within it without taking file attachments into account, I have a ton of file attachments myself. I think my biggest table is near 300 MB. That also goes into another issue though, the max table size of 500 MB. At some point I will need to figure out an archiving strategy before things hit that wall.
I have one single table that has 1200 fields on it. It is awful to work in. When you load the field list page it takes a good 10-15 seconds to fully load and be useable.
What Mark mentioned about multiple roles is a great idea and something we have started to implement as well. Rather than making one off roles for specific users we can have them in multiple so that they can have manager permissions or whatever it is while also performing their other duties. Starting this early is probably the easiest because once you get too many roles you get really deep into that swamp and it is hard to leave. I inherited my app at this company but it currently has over 100 roles in it, not a fun thing to work with. At this point trying to unravel that mess would be a huge undertaking.
