[Feature Enhancement] Improved Performance for Popular Data Actions + Looking Ahead to Bulk Data in 2024

Announcements New features
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Hi everyone,

We’re excited to share that popular ways of creating, deleting, and updating things in Bubble have gotten more performant:

  • The row limit for the workflow action Upload data as CSV is now 10x larger
  • The workflow action Make changes to a list of things is 3x faster
  • The workflow action Delete a list of things is 3x faster
  • The delete button in the app data tab is 3x faster

Increased Row Limits on CSV Upload in Run Mode

The fastest way to import large amounts of data into Bubble is by uploading a CSV file. Before, the workflow action that allows end-users to upload a CSV in run mode was restrictive because the number of rows that could be processed was very limited. The limits previously ranged from 100 rows on the Starter and legacy Personal plans, to 1,000 rows on the Team and legacy Production plans. As a result, many of you told us you’d resorted to hacky workarounds or simply lived with a tedious upload experience.

This update increases all previous row limits by 10x. The new limits are:

  • 1,000 rows on the Starter plan
  • 2,000 rows on the Growth plan
  • 10,000 rows on the Team plan
  • 30,000 rows on the Enterprise plan

If you are already on one of these plans, no action is needed — even if you’re already using the Upload data as CSV action in your workflows. If you are on a legacy pricing plan, you can switch to one of our new pricing plans to take advantage of these increased limits. For more details about our pricing plans, visit bubble.io/pricing.

Modifying and Deleting Things 3x Faster

Many of you have expressed how important it is for us to make it faster to update and delete data in Bubble. Over the past few months, we’ve streamlined aspects of our backend processing and made three common ways to update data ~3x faster:

  • Make changes to a list of things
  • Delete a list of things
  • The delete button in the app data tab.

Over the last three months, we’ve sped up these actions to complete in about one-third the time. All things equal, you can expect snappier a experience with no impact on WU consumption for both you (in the Bubble editor) and your users.

Looking Ahead

We recognize that these improvements are incremental. The work we’re doing now behind the scenes is helping us strengthen our technical foundation to set us up for bigger wins over the rest of this year and into 2024.

Our team is actively working to deliver on our product vision to support apps at any scale, with projects including:

  • Eliminating capacity timeouts that happen in the middle of workflows
  • Isolating backend and frontend capacity so that management tasks do not affect your app’s end-user experience
  • Providing native ways to reliably schedule and run backend workflows on the order of millions
  • Improving observability, management, and logs for long-running jobs
  • Redesigning the experience and enhancing performance for viewing and manipulating large datasets in the app data tab

These projects have been prioritized based on feedback from the Bubble community. We look forward to sharing more updates in the coming weeks and months!

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@steven.harrington Is this faster than using the Data API Bulk Create endpoint? (assuming a limit of 1000 items on both)

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Really great stuff! Thanks!

Also, @steven.harrington, I’m curious about the status of Bubble’s commitment to making operations more efficient from a WU-consumption perspective. For instance, what’s the status of the count is 0 issue, which has been discussed much on the forum and is nicely summarized in this article.

I mean, it wouldn’t be so bad if the most natural and intuitive way to check for an empty list wasn’t the most expensive by a factor of nearly 20.

It’s truly unfortunate that users of a no-code platform have to devote resources (time, mental, and money) to “optimizing” their app for this kind of thing when the optimization is actually needed at Bubble’s end.

:neutral_face:

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Great improvements @steven.harrington :fire:

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Fantastic improvements!

Small question. Is catching errors in the backend on the roadmap?

We have a lovely catch error in frontend workflow.

Would really love to catch errors in backend and handle them. At the moment they fail silently and are very hard to work around.

We’ve had to resort to external health check systems and various dodgy workarounds.

Thanks
Zubair

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These are exciting changes, great work Bubble team!

I wanted to ask where Create a List of Things we on this roadmap - and if it could be easily created from the inputs on a Repeating Group…

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Add &backend_issue_checker=true to the editor url … but be prepared for the editor to become slower … :sweat:

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I don’t mean editor errors but runtime errors.

Some API timed out
Some API glitched (openAI glitching a lot lately)

Cant easily catch and handle them all

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@ZubairLK you can use Ncscale or Flusk to track those issues for now, it is working great, but I’m okay with you, we should have something natively.
There is so many bugs I ve fixed thanks to those third party tools.
Easy way to catch “app too busy” “timed out” and “workflow error”

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I like them.

But with that being said, I’d like @steven.harrington to consider something built-in

Thanks
Zubair

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What’s the limit on the Agency Plan? (it seems to still be 100 rows)

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Bubble Workflows are indeed very fast and very underrated.

Pee loading times and seo might keep us awake at night, but I honestly have no complaints with how fast workflows edit data.

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Thanks for calling this out! We’ve increased this by 10x as well, so should be 1k rows now.

1 Like