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I attended the BP302 (App. Perf. Techniques) session at Lotusphere and felt inundated with very valuable information. Jame Magee and Kevin Marshall did a great job with the session.

For those of you who were unable to get out to Lotusphere, here are some of my favorite tips from that session:

1. Use a seperate physical disk for view indexing (the most demanding process, often 25% of the Domino server’s workload). Simply change to a new disk drive using the “View_Rebuild_Dir” item in the ini.
2. Minimize categorized columns in a view. (The more you have, the worse the performance.)
3. Lots of click-to-sort columns are bad, mm-kay? (Plus each one adds to the index process)
4. Avoid using @Today and @Now. — Instead, consider a nightly agent that moves documents into a folder and then back out again (when date matches are/aren’t met).
   
5. Reader fields cause delays if the reader has access to less than 5% of the documents (in db’s with more than 1000 docs).
6. Aliases rock! They are the fastest way to reference stuff.
7. @DBColumn and @DBLookup are always faster than using Lotuscript counterparts.
8. “For” loops are 60% faster than “Do” loops.
9. More than 3 computed subforms on a form begins to reduce performance exponentially with each one that was added. (At that point in the conference, the person next to me said “Uh oh, I have an app with 7 on one form.” — Uh oh, indeed! )
10. If you need a statement that looks like this:
    If a=x and b=y …
    then use the following one instead:
    If a=x then b=y …
    (our brains know to stop when we see “and” if the first criteria isn’t matched … however Domino keeps going because to it, “and” means “there’s more, keep going.” Using “then” stops if the first criteria isn’t valid).

Handy stuff. Can’t wait to see what they crank out next year!

I’ve
spent the last 12 months testing a plethora of solutions that will help
me take my Notes information with me on the go. Its been…
interesting. — So save yourself some time, and check out what I’ve
learned…

First, the criteria (well, mine anyway):

• Easy to set up
• Leverage as much of Domino as possible
• Support multiple mobile platforms (Palm, Windows Mobile, and Symbian … SyncML would be nice too.)
• Easy for end-users to use
• Solid integration with Notes (ie. unread marks transfer, UI isn’t drastically different, etc.)

I narrowed it down to three choices. The results were:

Blackberry BES Server
Pros: Defacto standard for mobile messaging. “Push” sync/replication technology means instant message delivery.
Cons: Requires SQL server. Limited to Blackberry devices. Very cumbersome setup (server side).
Website

mobileNotes
Pros: Nice UI. Ability to scale database apps into device somewhat easily.
Cons: Difficult to setup. Tech support and white papers were difficult to use/understand.
Website

Pylon Anywhere
Pros: Easy setup. No SQL database needed. “Synchronization” similar to “Replication” process. Great integration with Notes functionality. Ability to easily replicate Domino Directory, individual Personal Address books, and Journals to devices. Easy adminstration interface (Windows IIS-esque).
Cons: Replication only on interval basis. Poor battery life.
Website

In the end, I choose Pylon Anywhere and the end-users have been quite happy.

However, at Lotusphere, I was able to preview Good Technology’s upcoming Domino-compatable software. It appears to have all of the same functionality as Pylon with two important differences:

1. Supports “Push” technology similar to RIM/Blackberry BES server.
2. Costs about $100 less! (est.)

So stay tuned… when I test that one, I’ll be sure to post the results.