Book Image

ServiceNow: Building Powerful Workflows

By : Tim Woodruff, Martin Wood, Ashish Rudra Srivastava
Book Image

ServiceNow: Building Powerful Workflows

By: Tim Woodruff, Martin Wood, Ashish Rudra Srivastava

Overview of this book

ServiceNow is a SaaS application that provides workflow form-based applications. It is an ideal platform for creating enterprise-level applications, giving requesters and fulfillers improved visibility and access to a process. ServiceNow-based applications often replace email by providing a better way to get work done. This course will show you how to put important ServiceNow features to work in the real world. We will introduce key concepts and examples on managing and automating IT services, and help you build a solid foundation towards this new approach. You will then learn more about the power of tasks, events, and notifications. We’ll then focus on using web services and other mechanisms to integrate ServiceNow with other systems. Further on, you’ll learn how to secure applications and data, and understand how ServiceNow performs logging and error reporting. At the end of this course, you will acquire immediately applicable skills to rectify everyday problems encountered on the ServiceNow platform. The course provides you with highly practical content explaining ServiceNow from the following Packt books: 1. Learning ServiceNow 2. ServiceNow Cookbook 3. Mastering ServiceNow, Second Edition
Table of Contents (39 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Module 1
36
Bibliography

Building hierarchical tables


Chapter 1ServiceNow Foundations,  introduced the foundations of ServiceNow. One of the most fundamental parts of an application is how it stores its data, and we saw how virtually everything you see and do in the platform is stored in the database.

Specifically, ServiceNow is built on a relational database. Instances hosted by ServiceNow use MySQL, a popular open source database that is robust, well featured, and scalable. These kinds of relational databases are relatively simple to understand, which is one of the reasons they are most commonly used: data is held in tables and columns, and relationships may exist between rows.

Note

The ServiceNow platform can run on almost any relational database, such as Oracle or SQL Server. But supporting different architectures is difficult, so it is not a standard offering.

Benefiting from an object-oriented design

The simplicity of a relational database means that, on its own, it does not easily represent the data structures...