April '23 Office Hours Recap
Our April office hours focused on REST API performance best practices.
Session Highlights
We introduced our guest Andre Serrazina and he described a bit about his role as a Technical Advisory Manager at SugarCRM. The TAM team focuses on helping customers and partners overcome any technical challenges they encounter. A lot of times issues can come up with integrations that use the Sugar REST API that can cause problems in a customer instance or in our SugarCloud hosting environment. The TAM team will frequently get involved to discover and overcome these API-related issues.
Rafa kicked off the REST API discussion by going over the Integration section of our Developer On-Boarding framework. He talked about common integration approaches for integrating with Sugar REST API such as polling on date modified. He also spent some time talking about the most commonly used APIs for data integration - upsert, bulk.
There was a lively discussion about the available options for using the sync_key field for your upsert API calls when you are integrating with multiple applications. Remember that you can define additional keys for different integrations if needed. Though there are advantages to using the out-of-the-box sync_key field.
Andre then shared a demo of how you can inspect Sugar API calls using browser developer tools. Remember that Sugar web client uses the same REST API that you do! He also shared some tips for identifying REST API performance bottlenecks.
There were also longer discussions about best practices for programmatically loading data from CSV files into Sugar and the best approaches for handling 3rd party webhook events that need to be loaded into Sugar.
Rafa also shared some of his experience helping a customer load 5 million records into Sugar as part of their implementation. You can apply API best practices but you still sometimes need to make trade-offs with business requirements to ensure goals are met. For example, instead of loading all records in one big batch, you can break the data load down into phases focusing on the most frequently accessed data first. That way you can keep the downtime before going live on Sugar at a minimum since you are focusing on the data required for day-to-day usage.
It was a very full session! We went over an hour before deciding to call it.
Special Thanks
Many thanks to Andre Serrazina, Sr. Technical Advisory Manager, for joining us to share his experience on thoughts on the topic of REST API performance! And thanks to the many folks that participated in the discussion including Jerry Clark and Harald Kuske!
Session Recording
This session was recorded on April 5th, see here for the recording and here for the slides.
Let us know how we are doing!
We want to make sure our Developer Office Hours sessions continue to be relevant and valuable. Please provide feedback so we can continue to improve and better serve you!
Share your feedback with this short survey.
Next Session Sign-Up
Developer Office Hours are held on the first Wednesday of every month at 10 am ET / 7 am PT. The next session is being held on May 3rd, use this link to register for this and future Developer Office Hours sessions.