Now Available on Now Learning from Community Author Amit Gujarathi - Get Started with Remote Tables

[David Giammona1]

The Now Learning Community-Created Content program is delighted to release its newest course, Get Started with Remote Tables, from community author Amit Gujarathi! Amit has been implementing ServiceNow solutions for over six years. He is a Now Community MVP with a strong background in integration using REST, SSO, and scripting.  

With his YouTube channel TechnoMonk and website theTechnoMonk.com, Amit provides answers to all your tech questions with a mix of humor, cynicism, and insight. He is continuously adding new content to help community members learn programming and important coding concepts. Amit's content gives you the skills and resources to dive into new software engineering opportunities with confidence. Make sure to subscribe to keep in the loop on all his great tips and tricks.  

In this new course, Amit explores the use cases for ServiceNow remote tables. He demonstrates using remote tables to retrieve external data and optionally cache the data in memory. This eliminates the need to import or store temporary data. Developers and system administrators who need to obtain and store information in memory will benefit from Amit's explanation and demonstration.  

Recently, I asked Amit some questions about his ServiceNow journey and his thoughts on remote tables. Check out his responses below the TechnoMonk video trailer.  

Amit, thank you for all you do. Your dedication to sharing your knowledge and experience with other community members is inspiring. It is great to learn from you. 

How did you initially get introduced to ServiceNow?

I started my career as a full-stack developer working on Java, angular and Bootstrap, etc. but while working on the projects I was introduced to ServiceNow. I was utilizing the platform for multiple issues, queries, and change records.

Such a brilliant idea of managing huge infrastructures and day-to-day tasks in a very simple manner fascinated me. As ServiceNow already had my interest, I also started investing my time in learning more about the product. And today here I am - still exploring and trying to learn more!

What is the most important thing you did to advance your ServiceNow career?

Since I started learning ServiceNow, I have been very active on the forums and community. Initially, it was in a passive way where I just used to look at the discussions happening around various use cases and issues. Also whenever possible I tried to solve the issue or implement the use case by myself which helped me gain knowledge as well as confidence. I gradually started to actively participate in the forum discussion and provided my input wherever I can. 'ServiceNow Learn - Series', 'Chuck Tomasi - Youtube channel', and 'Technow Youtube series' were the golden source of knowledge in my journey of learning ServiceNow. As we say 'learning never stops'. I try to follow the same and tend to become a better version of myself every day.

What inspired you to create the TechnoMonk YouTube channel and website focused on ServiceNow?

I have been working extensively in ServiceNow for the past few years and I have gathered many experiences where I have faced both success and failures. I wanted to share this experience of my learning journey with the broader community of ServiceNow learning enthusiasts to provide them the help that I would have loved in the initial stages of my career. One more reason I started my Youtube channel 'Technomonk' is that I wanted to create an open-source repository of various scenarios which I had come across in my ServiceNow experience. Upon my participation in the communities and forums, I received various feedback and inputs which helped me learn more. And also I received comments where I was asked to provide a detailed explanation for a few topics which motivated me to create video tutorials for the same. I can say that this is my way of learning as "Knowledge shared = Knowledge squared".

In creating this course for Now Learning, is there anything you learned about ServiceNow remote tables you did not know before?

A small table or a topic is a very interesting feature or we can call it a module in ServiceNow. I found  remote tables when I started thinking about the use cases where the remote table can help. Just thinking in this way you want to define some process that works on the runtime data which is stored on the external system or database or use case. To have this runtime data in your system you have to have a scheduled batch pull job which will pull the data from an external system. Now if we go with the same approach it will lead to memory as well as performance issues isn't it true? This entire problem can be easily handled by the use of a remote table. Using remote tables you can fetch the runtime data whenever it's required and it doesn't dump the data to the ServiceNow Image, You can simply consider it as a virtual image of the required data.

What have been some of your favorite changes in the product over the past five years?

In the last 5 years, ServiceNow has grown in many aspects starting from the UI/UX to the development practices. ServiceNow for me has moved from code --> Low code and now it's shifting from Low code  --> No code. If I think what are the best features or changes in ServiceNow which attract me the most then the list will be quite long which includes AES, UI builder, Flow Designer, Integration Hub, etc. ServiceNow is making the life of developers easy with these features which are moving from coding to configurations. 

What is your favorite thing about being a part of the ServiceNow community?

The ServiceNow community is the place to engage with a variety of ServiceNow users who share common interests, goals, and objectives. It is an open platform to share, learn and create. You’ll find useful information from peers on best practice techniques, new product ideas, and everything else you need to shine and be successful on your ServiceNow journey. Whether you are a developer looking to share best practices, knowledge, and insight, a customer or a partner wishing to be a source of input for upcoming ServiceNow products, or just someone looking to engage in an open and innovative technical conversation, ServiceNow Community is where to do it.  

I love being a part of this community mainly for reasons such as:
* We can explore upcoming ServiceNow offerings
* We can rate and share our exciting product ideas
* Users can stay up to date with the community events calendar and attend online and in-person meet-ups, webinars, and much more.

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So, who will be the next Now Learning community author? How about you? Do you have content that would benefit from an expanded reach? Is it something that would complement the existing Now Learning curriculum or help develop different personas critical to the success of ServiceNow projects? Contact nowlearningcommunity@servicenow.com for details on bringing your content into Now Learning to help power the future of ServiceNow training innovation!