People who know of my work in the Windows world sometimes ask me how I, a “real” programmer and former Microsoft MVP, could become so involved with Salesforce development. I thought I’d write a different kind of article highlighting one of the Salesforce platform features that I find compelling—and that makes Salesforce, for me, a serious platform for software development. Instead of the usual “dry” technical article, I present to you a story – a work of fiction (except for the technology, which is all true).
My housemate’s voice just barely infringed on my attention. “They deleted a field!” he yelled.
It wasn’t enough to distract me from my latest binge-watching effort.
“THEY DELETED A FIELD!”
The second time I couldn’t ignore him. I turned around to find quite a sight. He was on his feet shouting at the screen. Worse yet, he disturbed the cat, who decided I was the safest refuge. I reached for another allergy pill. Why we got a cat given my allergies, I have no idea.
“What’s going on?” I asked, trying to sound supportive. We’d both been working from home, sheltering in place for several months now, and I counted myself lucky—we still got along. Still, better him shouting at some remote miscreant than at me. “Who deleted what?”
He took a deep breath and explained. “Part of my client’s application went down yesterday, and they’ve been yelling at me to fix it,” he started. “It uses an Object Relationship Mapping library to make it easy to code against the database, and I was thinking it might have changed during a recent update. But it turns out that one of the client’s DBAs decided that a particular database column was no longer needed, and removed it.” He shook his head. “I just can’t believe it.”
Okay, I’m a nice guy, but I couldn’t resist.“I can’t believe it either – it has to be something else. You can’t delete a column that’s in use.”
“Of course you can’t, that’s why it failed,” he explained.
“No, you can’t,” I said. “It’s not possible. If the column is in use, the database won’t let you delete it.”
Now he looked at me like I was crazy. Well, crazier–both of us were now three months without a haircut, so looking crazy was becoming the new normal.
“What do you mean the database won’t let you delete it?” he asked. “The database doesn’t care what you delete. It’s a database.”
I decided to be stubborn for just a bit longer. “You yourself said you were using an ORM library–so yes, the database should know the column is being used. After all, you’ve defined the objects and fields that map to the tables and columns–so the information is available. Right?”
Though it’s still April, I’ve already begun to hear people ask the question that is on many minds – will Dreamforce happen this year?
Personally, it’s hard to see how it can, at least in it’s usual form – it’s hard to imagine that in November it will make sense to bring in 170,000 people from all over the world and place them in close proximity (and you know how close people crowd together during Dreamforce). Given the values of Salesforce and our Ohana to not put people’s lives at risk, and the science driven decision making by our state and local governments that is perhaps less susceptible to emotional, irrational and political pressure than seems to be the case with other states, it would take a medical miracle. Such a miracle could happen – we are talking six months from now. But even as we hope for such a miracle, creating some backup plans would seem prudent.
So what might such backup plans look like? I’m sure the folks at Salesforce are asking themselves “how do we translate the Dreamforce experience into a virtual experience?” Along the way, I am sure they will look at best practices from other conferences that have gone virtual.
But I think this is also an opportunity. There is a real need to reinvent virtual conferences beyond a series of video-conferencing calls and webinars. And I think Salesforce is the right company to pioneer this. I’m going to share some thoughts – I doubt they could be implemented by November, but perhaps early steps can be taken.
The challenge with virtual conferences is that we’re all tired of sitting in front of screens and watching things. Besides, a conference isn’t just about watching sessions – it’s about exploring, and connecting with peers, customers and vendors. It’s about engaging – a conference is not a passive activity.
If only there were a way to make a virtual experience that is as engaging – or even more engaging – than a physical conference….
Oh wait – there is one… A virtual experience so engaging that tens, maybe hundreds of millions of people experience it every day. One so compelling that it’s often hard to leave. And one that generates billions of dollars of revenue ever year.
Yesterday I was honored to be once again awarded the tile of Salesforce MVP.
Today, the COVID-19 virus was declared to be a pandemic. I don’t think there’s a connection…
That said, I wanted to take a step back and say a few words about what it means to me today and going forward. As an MVP I have a responsibility – to share what I know, to contribute to the community, and to strengthen our Ohana. Usually for me this means sharing what I discover about technology, through writing and through presenting.
But today there are priorities – we, our entire Ohana – is facing a crisis. Salesforce has already taken a lead in this, being among the first companies to shift to remote work as much as possible, taking conferences virtual, and supporting its hourly workers. The importance and impact of this cannot be overstated – those actions will save lives.
As a Salesforce MVP, and as a human being, I feel an obligation to follow and lead in a similar way. I recently and very reluctantly withdrew from speaking at London’s Calling. As someone located in a developing “hot spot”, I could not risk the possibility of bringing the virus there (nor was I excited about the prospect of being quarantined far from home). I wish them the best and know they will take the necessary precautions for those who attend – and I very much look forward to attending in the future – it’s a great conference.
I’ve recently posted articles on Linkedin (see the list here) that I’m hoping will be helpful to people in their thinking and coping with the developing situation.
I expect I will not be speaking much this year (though I did submit a proposal for virtualdreamin – an event that could not be more timely), but will instead find other ways to contribute.
I am so grateful to be a part of this community, and honored to be an MVP. But today, more than anything, this means doing what I can to encourage others to do everything possible to remain healthy and slow the spread of the virus. We can talk technology tomorrow.
As process builder has grown more capable, it has also grown in its ability to consume CPU time. Most of the time, this won’t matter – however, if you aren’t careful, your carefully built process that works just fine with individual records, will blow up spectacularly when you start doing bulk operations. Using the Evaluate Next Criteria option can be a major contributor.
The reason is simple – at this time, one of the greatest consumer of CPU time in processes is the criteria – the rule.
Let’s look at a simple example:
This process has four criteria nodes that divide up states by the size of the state. Each of the criteria has simple formula rule such as this one that identifies the largest states: CONTAINS(‘CA,TX,FL,NY,PA,IL,OH,GA,NC,MI,NJ’, [Lead].State ) . The action calls out to an Apex method that logs consumed CPU time (trust me when I say this action costs very little CPU time).
Now imagine inserting 200 leads distributed evenly across all 50 states. With the process as is, all of the leads are evaluated by each node, regardless of the fact that it is impossible for a lead to qualify under more than one criteria (a lead can’t be in two states at once). The average time consumed was 303ms.
Running the same lead insertion after modifying the process to stop after each criteria is met, results in fewer leads being evaluated on each criteria node. In this example, since we distributed the leads equally by state, 75% will be evaluated on the second node, 50% on the third, and the rest on the last. This reduces the average CPU time consumption to 250ms.
What if all of the records belong to California – in other words, all of them match the first criteria node? In the first process example, where “Evaluate the Next Criteria” is set, there is no difference in CPU time! It still consumes 303ms. This makes sense, as all of the leads are evaluated by each rule.
However, when using the second process that does not evaluate the next criteria, in this scenario only the first criteria is evaluated and the average CPU time drops to 185ms!
Minimizing Rule Execution is an Essential Part of Process Builder Optimization
Executing criteria nodes is costly – by my estimates it runs 75-100ms per criteria against 200 records. When considered in terms of overall CPU time usage, this means that if you execute 100 criteria across multiple processes and sub-processes, that alone may be enough to exceed CPU limits even if nothing else is present in your org (workflows, actions, Apex, validation rules, etc.) – and who has that? Hopefully this will be an area where future optimization work will be done, but for now, it’s essential to design your processes to minimize the number of rules that execute – and stopping evaluation as soon as possible is a great start.
Update: I was asked if this advice contradicts the “One Process to Rule Them All” design pattern of combining multiple processes on an object into one and using the “Evaluate Next Criteria Option” in that case. It does not. There are two reasons why: 1. Combining criteria into one process will cost the same or less CPU time than having it in separate processes. 2. Combining processes into one makes it possible to add an initial negative criteria node – one that stops execution for any record that does not meet any of the subsequent criteria – thus improving efficiency over having multiple processes where each criteria is evaluated for every record.
Methodology Benchmarking CPU time usage is tricky. I have an entire section in my book “Advanced Apex Programming” about how it’s done, and you can find how those techniques can be applied to declarative constructs in a talk Robert Watson and I did at Dreamforce back in 2016 called “It’s About (CPU) Time – The Dark Art of Benchmarking“. The specific numbers in that talk are long obsolete, but the methodology is sound, and I’ve continued to use it to examine Process Builder. The numbers here were generated on a API 47 scratch org on 2/4/2020. Preliminary testing shows comparable numbers on an API 48 Spring 2020 preview org). Numbers were averaged across 5 tests.
There. I said it. Blasphemy right? When it comes to Salesforce triggers, it’s common to think about frameworks. What’s the best framework to use? Should I find one or create my own? A framework can offer efficiency – code reuse and code you don’t have to write yourself. It can provide discipline – everybody has to use the framework. It can improve reliability and maintainability, and make problems easier to debug.
And in a brand new org with a single development team, you can make it work – 100% enthusiastic adoption.
But we live in the real world. And real orgs are often.. well, a mess. Or, to adopt a more Orwellian term- a “Happy Soup”. There are multiple development teams, some of whom don’t talk to each other. There’s no way they would all agree on a single framework. And the cost and risk of rewriting existing code into a framework is prohibitive. Nobody knows what half the code actually does anyway.
That’s right, in the real world, trigger frameworks are not nearly as useful as they sound. But that doesn’t mean you should give up. As it turns out, it’s possible to apply the same design patterns that trigger frameworks use when working in “Happy Soup” orgs. It’s possible to make small incremental changes that have massive benefit. In fact, you can achieve most of the benefits of a trigger framework at almost no cost and no risk.
