Every day, the Technical Enablement team works with customers like you to review their architectures and help them solve implementation challenges on the Salesforce platform. One of those implementation challenges involves a seemingly simple platform feature: formula fields. Under the hood, complex formula fields can consume a lot of resources, lead to slow query response times, and hurt your users’ productivity.
We see these problems in many of our customer cases, and we know that the best way to avoid them involves learning both what makes formula fields efficient and how to build them. If you’re a developer, architect, or administrator who wants to build lightning-fast formula fields, you’ll want to attend our intermediate-level Dreamforce session, Revving Up the Force.com Formula Engine, and its associated workshop.
In the session, we’ll walk you through how the formula engine relates to indexing, and discuss some common performance problems related to formula fields that cannot be indexed or are overly complex. You’ll learn what makes formulas deterministic—and in turn makes formula fields available for indexing—and how you can improve the performance of your implementation.
The session will also include a customer case study presented by Appirio, and you can get hands-on formula performance optimization experience in the Developer Zone workshop’s practical exercises. Note that the session assumes that you already understand how to set up formulas; we’ll spend the majority of our time covering creative ways to improve performance.
Related Resources
- Revving Up the Force.com Formula Engine session registration pages (Dreamforce login required)
- Force.com SOQL Best Practices: Nulls and Formula Fields
- Force.com Formula Fields, Indexes, and Performance Gotchas
- Dealing with Exception Filters in Force.com
- Webinar: Inside the Force.com Query Optimizer
- Architect Core Resources
About the Author and CCE Technical Enablement
Bud Vieira and Daisuke Kawamoto are Architect Evangelists within the Technical Enablement of the salesforce.com Customer-Centric Engineering group. The team’s mission is to help customers understand how to implement technically sound Salesforce solutions. Check out all of the resources that this team maintains on the Architect Core Resources page of Developer Force.