Forum Discussion

ArchiveUser's avatar
ArchiveUser
Qrew Captain
8 years ago

Why are reverse relationships bad?

Somebody mentioned to me that I have a lot of reverse relationships.  I read somewhere they are bad, but I have not found a reason.  Can anyone elaborate?

Our app has reverse relationships to act as max summary fields and push data back up to the parent record.  I did this because most of my tables can really be a 1-to-1 relationship and I hate the look of the embedded reports.  I like seeing items as individual fields.  There are a few embedded reports, but these are to handle the few instances where I need to account for multiple names or items.

Thoughts on this are appreciated also.
  • QuickBaseCoachD's avatar
    QuickBaseCoachD
    Qrew Captain
    8 years ago
    Only issue with her purse relationships is that if you have a very large database this can cause the app to have performance issues. I.e. get slow.

    There are purest to really hate seeing any reverse relationships, but as an engineer I feel that if it gets the job done use reverse relationships.

    Now if you're dealing with an app that has a half 1 million records well yes I would Cautious, but most of us are dealing with apps that have less than 50,000 records and reverse relationship so really no problem.

    This response was dictated using Siri and I don't have my reading glasses so I hope she transcribed OK for me.
  • MichaelBarrow's avatar
    MichaelBarrow
    Qrew Cadet
    8 years ago
    Yeah, I have a great many tables in my app (73) and numerous reverse relationships throughout, and several tables that have hundreds of thousands of records. Overall, I think a bigger performance killer is simply not being smart about ordering your report filters correctly and not being smart about what embedded reports and charts you put on forms that get loaded frequently.
    • ArchiveUser's avatar
      ArchiveUser
      Qrew Captain
      8 years ago
      I have not received permissions to go live with the app yet so I haven't had it tested to extremes, though we are much smaller than your app it sounds like (25 tables and currently <1200 projects).  

      I would be curious to learn what situations are slowing you down though, if you would be willing to talk.  I just would like to see what types of charts are slowing you down and how much/ / from where the data is coming, 1, 2, many tables etc.