Big tables use cases and limitations

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Hi gliders,

I got an app that uses around 14k rows and it performs ok when using the app but is slow when editing the app in the builder.

I’ve started to look at big tables as Glide says it is the solution to slower apps with lots of rows.

The thing is there is so many limitations that I don’t really see what the big tables would be useful for?

Products/inventory?
Big tables don’t sync across devices so if someone adjust the inventory while someone else using the app checks this exact item it would still show as available and could cause users to have false information.

Chat messages?
Again as they don’t sync across devices the users would have to reboot their devices to get the new messages.

CRM activities like calls, appointments, follow ups, etc.
Still not a good use case because in my experience I use a lot of computed columns as target for rollups in this type of table. Also can’t batch delete rows trough relations in big tables…

The only use case I could think of would be some sort of knowledge base with only a couple of basic columns.

I’m starting to build apps for clients but the current row limitations worries me as I will need to implement complex query columns filtering for specific criterias to batch delete unused rows while making sure to not delete important rows that might be important.

Has anyone used big tables for any of those situations? How do you guys handle apps with lots of rows?

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That’s not strictly true. They do sync, they just don’t auto-refresh without some sort of trigger such as opening a screen or initiating a reload query action.

Not true. Anytime a user navigates to a screen that contains data that is sourced from a Big Table, the data will update.

You can use the Glide API for this.

Yes, I use Big Tables extensively. Yes, there are limitations. But you also learn techniques and strategies to work around them. In particular, I make good use of Joined Lists and JavaScript when working with Big Tables. I find that with a combination of those two column types I can work around many of the current limitations.

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could you share some examples of using javascript in big tables situations?