Skip to main content
Question

Why are reverse relationships bad?

  • Aug 7, 2017 5:39 PM UTC
  • 0 replies
  • 76 views

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.
This topic has been closed for replies.

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.

  • Author
  • Observing
  • Aug 7, 2017 6:09 PM UTC
Cool.  just an sidebar question.

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.