ServiceNow announced general availability of their latest release Geneva today. SnowMirror is always keeping pace with ServiceNow releases and patches, so welcome SnowMirror 3.1, Geneva-compatible version which was released the same day as ServiceNow Geneva. This new version contains several new features and improvements. Mainly the Display Values support has been re-worked and there was a large optimization in the meta-data handling.
Geneva Support
SnowMirror 3.1 fully supports the Geneva release Patch 1. The data type mapping has been adjusted, all connection testers and validation functions improved and the whole application has been tested against a number of Geneva instances. If you find any issues replicating the data from Geneva, please let us know at service@www.snow-mirror.com.
Display Values Improvements
In the older SnowMirror releases the data types of all the display value columns were unified to strings with 1000 characters. Simply, SnowMirror was not analyzing all the meta-data in the System Dictionary to figure out which field is going to be a display value for a certain record. Starting with SnowMirror 3.1 this analysis is happening so all the display value columns get correct data types. These new rules apply only to synchronizations created in the new version. Older tables with the 1000-char strings are still supported for data downloads.
Please note that this new algorithm requires access to one more table: sys_dictionary_override. Existing users shall adjust privileges of their SnowMirror ServiceNow users.
Meta-Data Handling
SnowMirror queries ServiceNow dictionary and other tables to get the info about tables, columns, views, etc. Most of the queries were being cached so the instance was not queried over and over again with the same requests. However, there was still some space to make it better. SnowMirror team completely re-designed the meta-data handling so it is sending significantly fewer requests for ServiceNow meta-data. Both during configuration and data downloads. The most visible effect is that the bulk creation process executes more than 10 times faster in the new version.
