Revving up the Force.com Formula Engine

Revving Up the Force.com Formula Engine
Bud Vieira, salesforce.com, @aavra
Daisuke Kawamoto, salesforce.com, @daisukeSfdc
Nathan Shilling, Appirio, @nds9619

Safe Harbor
Safe harbor statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995:
This presentation may contain forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. If any such uncertainties
materialize or if any of the assumptions proves incorrect, the results of salesforce.com, inc. could differ materially from the results
expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements we make. All statements other than statements of historical fact could be
deemed forward-looking, including any projections of product or service availability, subscriber growth, earnings, revenues, or other
financial items and any statements regarding strategies or plans of management for future operations, statements of belief, any
statements concerning new, planned, or upgraded services or technology developments and customer contracts or use of our services.
The risks and uncertainties referred to above include – but are not limited to – risks associated with developing and delivering new
functionality for our service, new products and services, our new business model, our past operating losses, possible fluctuations in our
operating results and rate of growth, interruptions or delays in our Web hosting, breach of our security measures, the outcome of any
litigation, risks associated with completed and any possible mergers and acquisitions, the immature market in which we operate, our
relatively limited operating history, our ability to expand, retain, and motivate our employees and manage our growth, new releases of our
service and successful customer deployment, our limited history reselling non-salesforce.com products, and utilization and selling to
larger enterprise customers. Further information on potential factors that could affect the financial results of salesforce.com, inc. is
included in our annual report on Form 10-K for the most recent fiscal year and in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the most recent
fiscal quarter. These documents and others containing important disclosures are available on the SEC Filings section of the Investor
Information section of our Web site.
Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other presentations, press releases or public statements are not currently
available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase our services should make the purchase decisions
based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce.com, inc. assumes no obligation and does not intend to update these
forward-looking statements.

You are a Force.com developer,
architect, or administrator ...

… you want to know why your
queries & reports that use
formula fields are so slow ...

… so you can design a
solution that
scales & performs
better.

You need to understand how
formula evaluation works under
the hood!

Takeaways …
Index selective formula fields!
Reduce run-time overhead!

Why use formula fields?

Data

Logic

Display

How does a formula field work?

Filtering on formula fields
[SELECT …
FROM Invoice__c
WHERE Portfolio_Formula__c = ‘US Portfolio’
LIMIT 150]
Report

List View

To be indexed, a formula

MUST
be deterministic

How does indexing work?

Click SAVE

Save to Object

Edit Record

Evaluate
Formula

Write to
Index
Table

A field is deterministic …

… when the value of the field
DOES NOT CHANGE
between save events on its record

What prevents formula fields from being indexed?
Formula Element

Can be Indexed?

Why?

Contact__r.LastName

No

Values change between
formula record updates

< (Today() + 3)

No

Date functions change
in real time

Opportunity.Amount

No

Special functionality

Country__c

Depends

Formula field could be
non-deterministic

Fields that Force.com cannot index

Exhaustive list of fields: http://bit.ly/XL8ybp

Solution #1
Store lookup values
on the same object

Solution #1
1. Create custom field on object
2. Define workflow rules
3. Add field update actions
Or use Apex triggers

Solution #2

IF(AND((Invoice_Total__c > 1000),(Recurring__c),(Collective__c)),
IF(AND(Contact__r.Country__c="United States",(Invoice_Total__c >= 10000)), "US Over 10K",
IF(AND(Contact__r.Country__c="United States",(Invoice_Total__c >= 5000)), "US Over 5K",
IF(AND(Contact__r.Country__c="United States",(Invoice_Total__c < 5000)), "US Under 5K",
IF((Invoice_Total__c >= 8000),
IF(Contact__r.Country__c="Canada", "CAN Over 8K",
IF(Contact__r.Country__c="Italy", "IT Over 8K",
IF(Contact__r.Country__c="Australia","AU Over 8K","Other"))),
IF((Invoice_Total__c >= 4000),
IF(Contact__r.Country__c="Canada","CAN Over 4K",
IF(Contact__r.Country__c="Italy", "IT Over 4K",
IF(Contact__r.Country__c="Australia", "AU Over 4K","Other"))),
IF(Contact__r.Country__c="Italy", "IT Under 4K",
IF(Contact__r.Country__c="Canada","CAN Under 4K",
IF(Contact__r.Country__c="Australia","AU Under 4K"
,"Other”))))))) ,NULL)

Invoice Total

SELECT …
FROM Invoice__c
WHERE Formula__c = ‘US Over
8K’
SELECT …
FROM Invoice__c
WHERE Formula1__c = ‘US’
AND Formula2__c = true
AND Invoice_Total__c >= 8000

Country (lookup)

Invoice is BOTH
Recurring AND
Collective

IF(Contact__r.Country__c="United States", "US"
IF(Contact__r.Country__c="Canada", "CAN",
IF(Contact__r.Country__c="Italy", "IT",
IF(Contact__r.Country__c="Australia","AU","Other"
))),NULL)

Country (lookup)

IF( AND(Recurring__c, Collective__c ),TRUE,FALSE)

Invoice is BOTH
Recurring AND
Collective

Solution #3
Spell it out in your QUERY
Age__c = TODAY() - CloseDate
SELECT Id, Name
FROM Opportunity
WHERE Age__c > 14
AND Age__c <= 21
SELECT Id, Name
FROM Opportunity
WHERE (CloseDate > LAST_N_DAYS:14)
AND (CloseDate = LAST_N_DAYS:21)

Index selective formula fields

save thousands of ms (runTime)
Call Customer Support
Get your selective formula fields indexed

When to index formula fields

Deterministic?
Selective?
Frequently used?

INDEX

Formula complexity can

EXPLODE
run-time SQL

The formula field in this simple SOQL query …

SELECT Formula__c FROM Invoice__c

… has moderately complex logic …
IF( (Invoice_Total__c > 1000),
IF(CONTAINS(Country__c , "United States") &&(RPE__c > 500000), "US Portfolio",
IF(CONTAINS(Country__c , "United States") &&(RPE__c <= 500000), "US Non-Portfolio",
IF(CONTAINS(Country__c , "Canada") &&(RPE__c > 400000), "CAN Portfolio",
IF(CONTAINS(Country__c , "Canada") &&(RPE__c <= 400000), "CAN Non-Portfolio",
IF((RPE__c > 300000),
IF(CONTAINS(Country__c , "Italy"),"IT Portfolio",
IF(CONTAINS(Country__c , "France"),"FR Portfolio",
IF(CONTAINS(Country__c , "Australia"),"AU Portfolio",
IF(CONTAINS(Country__c , "Japan"), "JP Portfolio","Other")))),
IF(CONTAINS(Country__c , "Italy"), "IT Non-Portfolio",
IF(CONTAINS(Country__c , "France"), "FR Non-Portfolio",
IF(CONTAINS(Country__c , "Australia"), "AU Non-Portfolio",
IF(CONTAINS(Country__c , "Japan"), "JP Non-Portfolio","Other"
))))))))),NULL)

… which generates run-time SQL like this!

Where is all the SQL coming from?
• Spanning objects
• Nesting logic
• Nesting other formula fields

All at RUN TIME

Solution #1 – Store static values
• Workflow actions
• Triggers
• Integrations

Now the runtime SQL statement looks like this!

Save 100s of ms

Solution #2 – Split up the formula
IF((RPE__c > 300000),
))))))))),NULL)

"Other"
)))),NULL)

North America

IF((RPE__c > 300000),
))))),NULL)

APAC and EMEA

Save about 100 ms

Making formulas scream!
Customer case studies

Nathan Shilling
Regional Practice Lead
Certified Technical Architect
@nds9619

All About Appirio
Appirio is a global services provider that helps enterprises
reimagine their business and become more agile using
crowdsourcing and cloud, social and mobile technology.
▪ More than 600 enterprise customers successfully moved to the cloud
▪ Strategic partner of salesforce.com since 2006
▪ On-demand access to 600,000 of the world’s top developers,
designers and data analysts through Appirio’s community

Business Challenge
• Users have multiple managers
in a hierarchy
• User Z sometimes has data
rolling up to Manager A

Details – Business Challenge
• The object we will report on is assigned to only one leaf
member of the hierarchy
• The user running the query can be a manager to multiple
members of the hierarchy
• The query should show all records at or below the Managers
top-level node
• Standard Role Hierarchy clearly doesn’t solve this!

Technical Solution – Query “My Team” records
• Formula is needed to determine “My Team” query
• “My Team” cannot be indexed
• “My Team” references Normalized data on Hierarchy record
•

If(Lead.Hierarchy__r.Parent__r.Parent__r.Level__c == User.Level__c…

•

If(Lead.Hierarchy__r.Parent__r.Level__c == User.Level__c…

• First try: Formula complexity taxed the query optimizer
• Lead object contains more than 10 million rows at any given
time

Denormalization & static values solve our problem

All the pieces put together…
• Store de-normalized hierarchy level values on Lead
• Store User’s top-level hierarchy value on User
• Simplify “My Team” formula to compare just those two sets
of fields

And the results querying from 10 million rows…
• First Iteration: 30 second query returning 1000 rows
• Using formulas to compare normalized reference fields

• Second Try: 6 second query returning 1000 rows
• Reduced formula to use de-normalized static values
• Still not fully performant because formula is not indexed

• Final Result: subsecond query returning 150 rows
• Negotiated business requirement change to only show
“Last 30 Days” of created Lead data
• A selective query using an index always wins!

Related DevZone hands-on, mini-workshop

Wednesday
9:15AM
or
3:45PM

Bud Vieira

Daisuke Kawamoto

Nathan Shilling

Architect Evangelist
@aavra

Architect Evangelist
@daisukeSfdc

Regional Practice Lead
Certified Technical Architect
Appirio@nds9619

We want to hear
from YOU!
Please take a moment to complete our
session survey
Surveys can be found in the “My Agenda”
portion of the Dreamforce app

Hands-on Work Shop
@ Developer Zone
Wednesday 9am & 1 pm

Revving up the Force.com Formula Engine

More Related Content

Similar to Revving up the Force.com Formula Engine

More from Salesforce Developers

Recently uploaded

Revving up the Force.com Formula Engine