It is Now Ready for Large Data Volume

We did a lot to make it fast and comfortable for users to work with data: our product now uses MS SQL Server database, client and server were optimized so that Business2Go is much faster with large data volume (tens of thousands of records). But what if there are more records in a list, let’s say hundreds of thousands or even millions? And what if the data is accessed via internet? Sadly, the user is going to have a hard time waiting for program response, sometimes a really long time. For example, showing the whole list of cities (specially prepared test data list with roughly 175,000 records) will take 20 seconds. You can extrapolate this on millions of records and imagine the minutes that you are going to spend waiting to see them. And this is, of course, totally unacceptable.

Different systems have different solutions for the big data problem, although often the problem is completely ignored by products for small and medium sized businesses. Enterprise-level products mainly use pagination, load more on scroll or sometimes asynchronous loading. We chose to stick with pagination which is a traditional solution for lists with significant data volume. But in different lists you can choose the mode yourself, whether you need to use pagination to load the data faster or see all your data at once. You might need to avoid such disadvantages of pagination:

• If a list counts totals by columns, the only available data for count will be that of current page;
• You can export the data only from current page;
• Same problem with printing the list.
  

However, in general pagination provides many advantages one of which is that you avoid lags when you work with huge data lists. Here is what we learned from our test:

• Showing all 175,000 records in the list takes around 3 minutes;
• With pagination mode on (with a portion of 1,000 records) showing the list takes less than a second.
  

Let’s take a look at how you use pagination in Business2Go. To turn it on in a list go to the list menu and select Pagination (alternatively, you can select the same command in form menu). This command usually can be found in View ribbon menu as you can see in the picture.



After you turn on pagination mode, you can manage it from the panel below.



From this panel you can navigate the pages using the navigation buttons or enter the page number directly in the field (also you can select one from the dropdown). You can change the number of records per page in Page Size field.

As you see, this is pretty simple. It is also really fast. What’s more important, you can use it only when you need it.