For one of our customer we have implemented a BCS based solution in Office 365. All is working however the external lists are very slow. ( somethign like 20 seconds to collect infromation); Does anybody else have any experience with BCS in Office 365 connecting to an on-premises SQL database? Miscrosoft support has been involved and they say that this is expected behaviour. Keypoints from Microsoft: SharePoint On-Premises environments are dedicated environments where as SharePoint Online is a shared environment, hence it would be slow as compared to SharePoint On-Premise.Since the SharePoint Online List has to fetch data from the External Database, it would take some time for it to fetch the data & save the changes to the External Database. If point 1 was true then I would expct to see a huge varation during the day/night. If point 2 was true then I would expect that nobody would implement BCS. I can understand that it would take some time to collect information but not 20 seconds or more. We found that all CRUD operations are slow.

I can second this! And been searching for solution for years.We arent even doing CRUD, just read-only for tagging. It is virtually unusable. I've tried all kinds of paging and filters and search criteria to try and speed things up. Our search results only return only the first 25 items that meet the criteria, and it takes approximately 20 to 30 seconds each query.In our case we are doing a BCS to ODATA connection with credentials in the Secure Store.

Hi Pieter, have not used BCS for a long long time cause of timeing issues. better would be to create a seperate app/webservice. and include in SharePoint Framework :-)

Several years ago, I used BCS with a web service to get data and I don't remember it being that bad, it was not snappy but I seem to recall getting several thousand records in a few seconds. You may want to reach out to @Brett Lonsdale at Lightning Tools to see if they have any suggestions.

No, it was in SPOnline, the webservice was running in an on-premises server

Forum Discussion

Pieter Veenstra

MVP

Mar 07, 2017

External List performance is poor in Office 365

For one of our customer we have implemented a BCS based solution in Office 365. All is working however the external lists are very slow. ( somethign like 20 seconds to collect infromation);

Does anybody else have any experience with BCS in Office 365 connecting to an on-premises SQL database?

Miscrosoft support has been involved and they say that this is expected behaviour.

Keypoints from Microsoft:

SharePoint On-Premises environments are dedicated environments where as SharePoint Online is a shared environment, hence it would be slow as compared to SharePoint On-Premise.
Since the SharePoint Online List has to fetch data from the External Database, it would take some time for it to fetch the data & save the changes to the External Database.

If point 1 was true then I would expct to see a huge varation during the day/night.

If point 2 was true then I would expect that nobody would implement BCS. I can understand that it would take some time to collect information but not 20 seconds or more. We found that all CRUD operations are slow.

developer

9 Replies

Brent Ellis
Silver Contributor
Mar 07, 2017
I can second this! And been searching for solution for years.

We arent even doing CRUD, just read-only for tagging. It is virtually unusable. I've tried all kinds of paging and filters and search criteria to try and speed things up. Our search results only return only the first 25 items that meet the criteria, and it takes approximately 20 to 30 seconds each query.

In our case we are doing a BCS to ODATA connection with credentials in the Secure Store.
- Pieter Veenstra
  MVP
  Mar 07, 2017
  Hi Brent Ellis,
  
  That is exactly what we are doing.
  - Pieter Veenstra
    MVP
    Mar 08, 2017
    I wrote up the details on my blog and a uservoice
    
    https://veenstra.me.uk/2017/03/07/office-365-bcs-performance-issues-dont-use-it/
    
    https://sharepoint.uservoice.com/forums/330318-sharepoint-administration/suggestions/18550603-bcs-on-office-365-doesn-t-perform-very-well-and-n
Anonymous
Mar 07, 2017
Hi Pieter,

have not used BCS for a long long time cause of timeing issues. better would be to create a seperate app/webservice. and include in SharePoint Framework :-)