Reduce timeouts for cascading transactions

Have you ever tried to assign an account to a new owner only to have the system lock up and timeout because you have too many child records in the cascading transaction set? A new feature is available for preview that will help reduce system timeouts when processing entity updates that use large volume cascading changes.

Currently, cascading operations are performed as a synchronous transaction. In a synchronous cascading transaction, all impacted records are identified by the system. As the records are processed, they are locked by the system. Once all the changes have been completed, the records are unlocked, and the transaction is completed. The trouble is that synchronous transactions with many records can cause performance issues for environments because long running transactions can fail due to server timeouts. Also, during these transactions, the records are locked preventing other jobs and user transactions that operate on the same records from executing. Long running transactions might result in a backlog of pending transactions and requests that decrease system performance and might cause work stoppage.

To decrease timeouts or degraded performance while cascading operations are in progress, we are changing cascading transactions from synchronous mode to asynchronous mode. For detailed information about synchronous vs. asynchronous modes and to track asynchronous operations, see the documentation at Asynchronous processing of cascading transactions

How can you preview asynchronous processing?

All Dynamics 365 online organizations will be migrated to asynchronous processing with the October release. There are two ways you can try it out early:

  1. You can test out this feature as part of the current preview. To participate, follow the steps outlined here: Early opt-in to 2019 release wave 2
  2. You can contact Microsoft directly to have your organization configured for asynchronous processing.

To submit your request to have your environment changed to asynchronous mode:

  1. Email: D365PI@microsoft.com
  2. Enter the subject line: Enable Asynchronous Cascading <transaction type>. For example, Enable Asynchronous Cascading Assign/Delete.
  3. In the body of the email include your environment name, environment ID, and Microsoft 365 tenant ID. To find the environment name and ID go to Settings > Developer Resources.

Let us know what you think!

We hope you enjoy the newly added features and are excited to hear what you thinks about them. If you have questions or other feedback, please let us know on the PowerApps administer PowerApps forum. We look forward to hearing from you!