ICYMI Q3 '24 Release Webinar Recap

In case you missed the latest webinar... 

We just wrapped our developer webinars for the Q3 2024 (14.1) release. Don't forget that Sugar Developers can test drive upcoming releases on your local machines thru the Sugar Release Preview program. New releases are previewed for 6-8 weeks before GA.

Key Takeaways

MySQL limitations when using large offsets for pagination

We'd recently worked with a couple of partners that ran into an issue where paging thru a very large result set (millions of records) was taking much longer than expected.

We discussed how pagination for millions of records using offset/limit is very inefficient and how that affects the MySQL database queries.

A more effective strategy is to store the ID of the last processed record and use it as a filter for subsequent records (don't forget to also order by ID as well).

This approach optimizes database performance by leveraging indexes and its internal dataset navigation (see article for details). With these changes, you shouldn't have problems paging thru multi-million record result sets.

Simplifying SQL for better performance

Using OR statements or wrapping columns with SQL functions can severely impact query performance

Oh yes, don't use OR statement or wrapping columns with functions, can impact the use of indexes and increase the number of rows your query touches when it is being executed. A recipe for poor performance. You are better off making multiple efficient queries or use UNION ALL when/if possible.

You can always check out the latest and greatest best practices in our Onboarding Framework.

New AI features and UX enhancements

We were excited to share information about our AI Summary dashlets which is Sugar's brand new AI-generated content feature.

Now you can use static conversion rates in the Quotes module. We've also made the chart colors consistent across the platform by using data as input for selecting the appropriate color.

Improved Bulk & Upsert REST APIs

This release marks a significant advancement in our REST API capabilities, particularly to our Bulk and Upsert APIs.

Now, with our Bulk API, you can retrieve data immediately after inserting it as part of the bulk response which eliminates the need for an additional round trip API call to retrieve these details. This improvement allows you to specify which fields you want returned for each request bundled into your Bulk API call.

For the Upsert API, you can now specify the sync_key value as a URL parameter instead of only as part of the URL path. This helps in situations where the sync key value contains "/" characters that will break the URL path. It's not uncommon for unique IDs in ERP systems to include reserved characters like slashes in stock codes or company codes.

Platform enhancements

We're constantly enhancing the platform to provide you with more capabilities in Sugar. In this release, we've enabled the Product Catalog for Serve users. We introduced the Rector scan for MLP installs to prevent PHP code incompatibilities. And we significantly improved the ExternalResourceClient (ERC) with methods and functionalities to help all developers fully migrate their code to the ERC. Finally, we introduced SecureSmarty classes to improve security.

No New JS or PHP Library Updates

We took a break from upgrading JS and PHP libraries in this release. We will continue to update libraries in future releases.