“Salesforce 'Aggressively Investigating' Database Error” [1]

1. “Salesforce.com 'Aggressively Investigating' Database Error” [1] Group 1: Maryam Forootaninia, Killain Pukema February 5th, 2013

2. What is Salesforce.com? • Global enterprise software company • Best known for customer relationship management (CRM) product • Robust environment where native and custom applications can scale to large data volumes very quickly and maintain good performance • Make the queries selective • Reduce the amount of active data

3. From the Article • Salesforce.com is "aggressively investigating" a database software error that led to temporary performance problems in part of its infrastructure. • The issue was isolated to a database software error, which caused [it] to stop servicing requests. • One problem concerned "an index creation process which caused resource contention on the NA4 database tier." • Another problem that affected the NA9 database tier cropped up due to "an unexpected fault with [their] database code."

4. Search Architecture • Indexes are created via the search indexing servers • Servers generally process queues of fewer than 9000 records in one to three minutes • If more than 9000 records are waiting to be indexed, the servers perform bulk indexing at a lower priority • First search the indexes for appropriate records, then narrow down the results based on access permissions, search limits, and other filters creating a result set

5. Indexes • Supports custom indexes on most fields • Practical upper limits on the numbers of records that can be returned more effectively by an indexed search than by an unindexed search • Does not use the index if the number or records to be returned exceeds 10% of the total number of records in the object or 333,000 records

6. The Future • Switching to a different vendor, in whole or in part • Hire around 50 people to work on a "huge PostgreSQL project" • NoSQL and NewSQL systems will soon match or surpass relational databases’ practical reliability

7. Reference • [1]The slides are prepared by Maryam Forootaninia and Killain Pukema, and the content of slides comes from the article: • “Salesforce.com 'Agressively Investigating' Database Error”Chris Kanaracus, January 30, 2013, http://www.cio.com/article/727853/Salesforce.com_39_aggressively_Investigating_39_Database_Error • And also from “Best Practices for Deployments with Large Data Volumes” October 30, 2011, • http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/ldv/salesforce_large_data_volumes_bp.pdf