New Line Item Text Format Type - SmallText

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erobbins
erobbins Member, ALL USERS, Partner, Certified Model Builder Posts: 2 Occasional Contributor
in Planning & Modeling

First, I would like to address that I do not know how the back end of Anaplan is built, so I am unsure as to the possibility or ease of implementation of this idea.

 

The idea is taking a concept from SQL Server. SQL Server has the following data types for storing integer values: bigint, int, smallint, and tinyint. The below chart shows the range of values and storage requirement for each data type.

 

int data type sql.png

 

The concept of this idea would be the same. Make a new line item text format, SmallText, that would limit the input of text to 60 characters to reduce the memory/storage requirements and increase model performance when used versus the traditional text format. Anaplan already has this text format requirement for list member codes (codes cannot exceed 60 characters), so it would seem that the Anaplan platform code for this item, that is already in production, could be leveraged to apply to the new SmallText line format type. I am sure that is an oversimplification of the engineering required, but hopefully, the idea is clear.

 

While minimizing text formatted line items and their calculations is a best practice in Anaplan model building, some models have the need for using smaller text strings at scale.

 

Assumptions

  • Limiting the amount of characters a text formatted line item can accept will have a direct impact on the memory/storage requirements of that text formatted line item thus increasing model performance.

 

Benefits

  • Performance increase across entire platform for all models where line items can be converted from Text to SmallText.
    • Faster models
    • Quicker save state times
    • Decreased model sizes
    • Etc.
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Comments

  • erobbins
    erobbins Member, ALL USERS, Partner, Certified Model Builder Posts: 2 Occasional Contributor

    @ben_speight, thank you for the thought out response from the engineering perspective. This proposal assumes that text is already within the current bounds, so I would like to steer the discussion toward your idea of storing inline instead of indirectly referencing. If this idea (and any others like it) has the opportunity to increase calculation performance, it would be good to know to what extent for models with low, medium, and high amounts of text and calculation of text line items.

     

    Even if the text calculations/functions would need to be re-implemented to get the improvement, I think it potentially would be worth it given how costly text is to models at scale. For all of the use cases that I can think of, I would not see a need to convert between limited and non-limited text thus locking in the performance improvements.

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