I have worked a lot with Big Tables right from the start, so I feel like I can share a few things that I’ve learned.
- My general rule of thumb is that I only use Big Tables for transactional type tables, where lots of rows are being added on a regular basis. If I expect the row count to climb above around 10k within a year, then I’ll definitely use a Big Table.
- When opting to use a Big Table, you need to think carefully about how it will be used, and how it will interact with other tables in your App. It’s always better to use more non-computed columns than less. For example, I would never store a Users name in a regular table. Instead I’d store a UserID and then use a relation+lookup to get the name. In a Big Table I will store both the UserID and the User Name.
- Whilst we don’t have support (yet) for all computed column types in Big Tables, this is being actively worked on. Right now we have support for Math, If-then-else, Template columns and perhaps one or two more. It is a stated goal of Glide to eventually remove the distinction between Regular and Big Tables, and I expect they’ll get there in time.
- You mention that you use Single Value columns a lot. That’s not yet fully supported with Big Tables, so you’ll need to think carefully about what you will do there.
- A combination of the Joined List plus a JavaScript column can be used very effectively to work around some Big Tables limitations. For example, where you might want to do some sort of aggregation that isn’t yet supported, what you can do is take a Joined List through a Query of all the values you want to aggregate, and the feed that into a JavaScript column. This technique has saved me on several occasions.
Overall, Big Tables are great, and I thoroughly recommend them 