Bulk Update Actions

On-demand bulk actions enable you to perform actions on multiple records in bulk from a Search results page in an application. Update fields across multiple records, create new reference records from search result records, or delete records in bulk. Bulk update actions allow you to inline edit fields from a cross-reference grid in a record.

Performance analysis notes

Testing produced the following results in an environment with a web server, a services server, a database server, and a caching server. Each server was equipped with eight cores and 24 GB memory, with the exception of the web server that had 24 cores and 24 GB memory.

During the first test, 1 million records were loaded into a simple application with 18 fields. No calculations or calculated cross-references were involved. Bulk Delete action was performed with different numbers of jobs running to perform the action to understand how this parameter affected the time required to complete the task.

  • The time required to complete the Bulk Delete action increased linearly as the number of records to be deleted increased.
  • The time required to complete the Bulk Delete action generally decreased as the number of jobs increased. This is not a linear relationship because adding more jobs also adds overhead. Improvement seen in completion time when increasing the number of jobs from 1 to 2 is much larger than increasing from 5 to 10.
  • Simply adding more jobs does not guarantee that Bulk Delete will complete faster.

During the second test, 1 million records were loaded in a simple application with 19 fields (including 1 cross-reference field) and no calculations were involved. The time required to update 100,000 records in the application using a data feed was compared to the time required to complete the same task using the Bulk Update action.

  • When all fields (including cross-reference) were updated with the data feed, it required approximately 4 hours to update 100,000 records. The Bulk Update action completed the same task in about 2 hours.
  • When the Cross-Reference field was excluded from the updates, the data feed required about 90 minutes to update 100,000 records. The Bulk Update action completed the same task in about 10 minutes.
  • Bulk Update action was generally faster for updates with synchronous calculations. The performance of Bulk Update action was better with 5 jobs for synchronous calculations compared to 10 jobs.