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