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varunb579494
varunb579494
July 16, 2023
Question

DB Tasks Vs Traditional UIT Design

  • July 16, 2023
  • 10 replies
  • 0 views

These days I have seen developers moving to using database tasks rather than a traditional User Input Task approach.

What are the possible advantages of using DB tasks in terms of reducing memory footprint, creating short lived processes, performance, concurrency and auditing?

Any way whether a process task report or using DB task, we'll be creating tasks to save task IDs, then how it is different and advantageous in comparison to process task report approach?

10 replies

stefanhelzle0001
stefanhelzle0001
July 16, 2023

I strongly suggest to stay with Appian OOTB as much as possible. Use processes and UITs. This is what Appian is made for. And this is not a "traditional" vs "somethingElse". IMHO, this is more about people trying to force Appian into a use case it is not made for.

And yes, there are use cases which cannot be implemented in the "traditional" way. But they are very rare.

mathieud0001
mathieud0001
July 16, 2023

I don't recommend this approach as well. OOTB features are meant to save you time. If you end up reimplementing those features, I think you would need a pretty good reason.

ignacio.moran
ignacio.moran
July 17, 2023

I also recommend to use OOTB features, just consider the next thing as I have already seen some performance issues using the OOTB: 

  • When creating a report make sure you do not apply any logic in the columns, just take directly the process variable, if any logic is needed, do it in the PM and expose it to the report. Applying logic to in the columns could generate bad performance if a high number of rows are queried with a!queryProcessAnalytics() 
varunb579494
varunb579494Author
July 17, 2023

That's a mistake. I was supposed to post a community discussion thread link related to the question here but in hurry ended up posting the teams link by mistake. My apologies.

Originally the comment was to understand the point made by konduruc6445 in the below discussion. Can someone please clarify?

community.appian.com/.../how-to-store-task-report-data-into-db

mikes0011
mikes0011
Brainy
July 17, 2023

edit: redacted mistake - thanks for explaining [emoticon:c4563cd7d5574777a71c318021cbbcc8]

Was this supposed to be something meaningful to anyone?

jacob.benjamin
jacob.benjamin
July 6, 2026

I'm going to resurrect this as I see most folks advocating for the OOTB task approach - is this still the favored approach? I've long held that DB tasks are the way to go - especially in regards to scalability and control over the platform. The OOTB tasks may be faster in the short run, but long-term you are going to be paying for it if you find that you do need to transition over the DB tasks. Also - general Appian best practices is to limit the use of long-running processes, which the OOTB task approach can encourage.

All this said because I'm looking for a recipe on how to implement DB tasks easily...

U
ujjwalr0002
July 7, 2026

Hi Jacob, since you are looking to implement it from scratch you can use the Hybrid approach suggested by Stefan https://appian.rocks/2025/04/23/episode-27-a-task-is-a-task/

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