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Product Updates
Product Updates
Product Update: March 2021
David Simpson
March 1, 2021
We've given imports a behind-the-scenes overhaul. Imports are now faster, more scalable, and more powerful.
You can now import up to 1 million rows from a single spreadsheet. That's right: 1 million! Beacon's modern, scalable infrastructure means that you'll never have to worry about how much data you want to bring into your Beacon database.
You don't have to import all of the rows from your spreadsheet at once. You can now set criteria which will cause a row to be ignored and not imported.
You can now choose what Beacon should do when a duplicate is found. The default behviour is to create a new record if it doesn't already exist or update an existing one. You've now got two more options and you can tell Beacon to never update existing rows, or to never create new records.
We all sometimes change our minds - and with Beacon now able to import 1 million rows at a time we've added a handy button that will stop an import when it's in progress.
We've been hard at work improving the mechanics of how every Beacon database works, and we've come up with some pretty nifty improvements.
Beacon's database uses indexes to make searching and filtering faster. Just like the index of a book, Beacon has indexes which help the system to look up what you're searching for without having to go through your records one by one.
Beacon now creates indexes dynamically and will constantly optimise itself for the sorts of searches and filters that you run most often. This means that once you've run a search, the next time you run it Beacon will have optimised itself to return what you're looking for even faster. Clever stuff!
We've also been improving the efficiency and stability of Beacon's systems to make sure that everything is running as snappily as you've come to expect!
Our intrepid band of Founder Members have been getting things off to a good start on Beacon's new private Facebook Group. It's a place to exchange ideas, tips, and best practices and all Beacon customers are now invited to join!
You can find the group here and we'd love to welcome you in.
The group is only available to Beacon customers.
Next, we're working on the Beacon Portal, which will allow people in your Beacon database to update their own information via a new type of form. We're also adding
