Smart Fields

Certain fields available for user-defined reports, views, and queries do more than just select a specific piece of data; they combine multiple pieces of data, or even make a decision about which data to display based on what is available. These fields are known as smart fields and are used to provide time-saving flexibility when mining information contained in your database.

For example, you create a query that calls up all donors in your database who gave $10,000 along with their first gift date. You routinely run this query, which takes a considerable amount of time to execute due to the size of your database and the complexity of the query (the database server must calculate the total for every record in your system). As the number of records in the database increases, the time necessary to execute the query increases. Replacing the summary fields in the query with smart fields considerably improves the execution time because the smart field values are generated at set intervals determined by your system administer and the values are cached. In addition, smart field updates consider only records added to the system since the last run date; they do not reconsider existing records already included in the value.