Why certain virtual columns slow down syncs

[Kirk_Masden]

Hi! I’ve recently gotten a lot of valuable help on how to avoid expensive virtual column expressions (that is, virtual column expressions that slow down syncs):

How to avoid expensive virtual column expressions Questions

My app is rather bloated and I think my sync times are slow because of how I’ve used virtual columns. This led me to search for tips regarding how to speed things up. Here’s a good one: I’m sure the advice is very good but I’m having trouble implementing @praveen’s fourth admonition: Avoid virtual columns with a SELECT and anything but an equality or IN filter condition To be honest, merely getting my app to do what I want it to do has been difficult for me. Figuring out how to do that…

This question is related to that thread but I thought it was different enough to warrant a separate post.

Today I found that the following expression can cause over a second of extra sync time in my app:

concatenate(ifs(MONTH([Began])=1,“January”,MONTH([Began])=2,“February”,MONTH([Began])=3,“March”,MONTH([Began])=4,“April”,MONTH([Began])=5,“May”,MONTH([Began])=6,“June”,MONTH([Began])=7,“July”,MONTH([Began])=8,“August”,MONTH([Began])=9,“September”,MONTH([Began])=10,“October”,MONTH([Began])=11,“November”,MONTH([Began])=12,“December”,)," “,day([Began]),”, “,year([Began]),”, ",TEXT([Began], “H:MM AM/PM”))

The expression is fairly long, and there are many records in the table (over 3000) that it applies to, but all it does is determine the format of a date that will be shown in a detail view. So, it would seem to me that AppSheet could basically ignore it at sync time and have the app handle the display format inside the device when the detail view is shown.

This leads me to another question. Is AppSheet continuing to work on its syncing algorithms? Or, in other words, can we reasonably expect syncing times to improve in the future as technology improves and as the syncing algorithm continues to be tweaked?

Thanks for your consideration.