IdeaJam(tm) : Add Discard Index: "Never" Option to View

Domino Designer / : Add Discard Index: "Never" Option to View

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 15:15:07 +0000

Author: Adam Fenstermaker
Tags: notesview index
Idea:

Creating a view index from scratch on a very large database (15+ GB) causes enough disk I/O to bring a pretty good-sized server to its knees. It can also cause a database to be very slow/unavailable until the index is built.

The web-based databases we create always seem to have some view that is accessed very infrequently - for example "sales categorized by sales rep then by zip code" - that gets accessed about 1/year - this causes the app to become unavailable until the view index is built (currently the longest view index discard period is 245 days).

I would like to have the option to have these indexes never discarded. Please let me manage my own disk space!

Thanks.

-Adam

re: Add Discard Index: "Never" Option to View

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:48:10 +0000

Author: Bill Malchisky
Comment: Adam -- the only reason I can surmise, which I'll admit is conjecture, is that if the index is never discarded, there could be the possibility of introducing corruption to the view itself or possibly the design; otherwise, it is probably a disk-management issue as you indicated.

I know of several tax-based or financial apps that are critical for two months a year, then go dormant the other ten months ... and they are quite large. So, it is possible for them to have a view go unused after that 245 day window.

Two possible work-arounds:
(1) Perhaps, to avoid the situation you mention, setup a program document to run updall -R <view_name> on the 244th day or nearest Friday evening/weekend ...
(2) or just setup a repeating reminder on your team calendar that will cause you to use the view--every 240 days. Then, the view index would remain. Yes, this is sub-optimal, but would help alleviate the problem in the near-term.

Good luck.

re: Add Discard Index: "Never" Option to View

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 21:21:40 +0000

Author: Adam Fenstermaker
Comment: @Bill Thanks for the feedback

Yes - not sure why an view index that wasn't opened by users would be any more likely to corrupt than a frequently used view index.

For workaround - I didn't think "-R" "resets" the discard index counter. (I thought this only happened with user access/@DBlookup/@DBcolumn - but may be wrong) . I know it won't do anything to a view that already has dropped its index.

I do know that a scheduled "updall -C" would keep all view indexes in the db built w/o having to specify db name. (and potentially chew up disk)