Could Someone Give me Advice on Optimizing Database Performance for Large Datasets?

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1

Hello there,

I am reaching out to seek advice and share my experiences related to managing and optimizing large datasets in Grist. Recently; I have been working on a project that involves handling a substantial amount of data over 200,000 rows and counting.

While Grist has been fantastic for organizing and visualizing my data, I am starting to notice some performance issues; particularly when running complex queries and generating reports.

Some of my more complex queries take significantly longer to run than I would like. Are there any best practices for optimizing query performance in Grist?

Importing large CSV files into Grist can be quite slow. Is there a more efficient method for importing data, or are there any recommended tools that integrate well with Grist to streamline this process?

I have several columns with complex formulas that seem to be impacting the overall performance. How can I optimize these calculations to reduce lag time?

Are there specific settings or configurations within Grist that can help better allocate resources for handling large datasets?

I have read through the official documentation and explored some of the community discussions, but I am hoping to gather more insights from those who have dealt with similar issues. Any tips; tricks; or tools that you have found helpful would be greatly appreciated.

Also, I have gone through this post: https://community.getgrist.com/t/grist-accepting-data-very-slowly/3417minitab which definitely helped me out a lot.

Additionally; if anyone has recommendations for resources or tutorials that dive deeper into advanced Grist usage and performance optimization; I would love to check them out.

Thank you in advance for your help and suggestions.

2

I had a similar problem where data entry got very slow since it was re-calculating some complex calculations each time I entered data.

I only needed it to calculate after data was entered. So I created a global variable called “calc”. It was a toggle field, true or false.

So then for every complex calculation I started the formula with:

if (calc)
.....whatever my complex calculation was

that way it would only calculate when I set the variable to true, so when entering data it didn’t calculate the formula

3

And thanks to a trick from @dmitry-grist, you could keep the values when un-toggling the field by using:

if not $calc:
  return PEEK($CURRENT_FIELD)

... whatever the complex calculation is