Event collections per project limit?

[Louis Zuckerman]

Is there any limit to the number of event collections in a single project?  I can't find the answer in the docs.

Thank you!

[Michelle Wetzler]

Hi Louis - 

How many do you imagine creating (hundreds? thousands?) and for what kind of use case? Often times there are alternative designs that are better than creating lots of collections (like using event properties to delineate customers, or creating separate projects instead of collections).

The limit on collections is high, like thousands of collections or maybe more. But I would want to make sure you consider alternatives before building something out that way, as there are some downsides to having lots of collections.

- Michelle

On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 1:21 PM, Louis Zuckerman <louiszu...@gmail.com> wrote:

Is there any limit to the number of event collections in a single project?  I can't find the answer in the docs.

Thank you!

--

Michelle Wetzler  |  Chief Data Scientist  |  Keen IO  |  618 604 5683  |  @michellewetzler

[Louis Zuckerman]

The use case is analyzing survey responses.  The docs said to put events which share the same properties in a collection.  We have lots of surveys that don't share much in common with each other, so I figured putting the responses in separate collections would be a good idea.  There's about 100 active surveys now and that will probably increase by about 200 per year going forward.

Also, since we're not on a Pro plan, we can't programmatically create new projects.

What are the downsides you're thinking of?  What are some alternatives?

Thanks!

[Michelle Wetzler]

Louis -

Thanks for reading my docs - I wrote that guide a long time ago :)

For this use case I think creating separate collections will be fine. The downsides are... 

1.  Compared to creating one collection for all of your survey submissions, it will be slightly more work to get a value like "total surveys submitted", or count the number of submissions by survey name.  If that's really important to you, consider sending another event in a global collection for "survey_submissions".
   
2. After you exceed hundreds of collections you might start to notice the data explorer UI get a little bit slower as it has to load all of those collection names into the dropdown menu. There is some limit at which the browser won't be able to load the list (probably in the thousands), but querying will still work fine at the API level.
3. Creating separate keys and access controls is harder to do at the collection level compared to the property level or the project level, but maybe that isn't a requirement for you.

Thanks for using Keen and let us know if you have any more questions! :D

- Michelle

[Louis Zuckerman]

Thanks for taking the time to help me out, Michelle,

I've found your docs to be very helpful too.

Have a great day!