Hi Everyone. In the past few days I’ve been asked to audit a few Notes Applications. Apart from the usual disabling of unread marks and removing views no longer used to increase performance, there is a very important setting on a Notes Database and can drastically reduce the indexing time of Notes Views.

It’s called “Optimize Document Table Map“.

Firstly, a quick scenario:

Let’s say you have a Notes Application that contains about 5 different Forms. For each form you have about 3 – 5 Notes Views. Also for each Form you have about 5000-10000 documents.

When it comes to indexing Views, if the property “Optimize Document Table Map” is not selected in the Notes Database Properties, the following happens:

When indexing a certain View,  Notes will search through all documents created from all 5 Forms in the Database to produce the result in the View. If you only have a few hundred documents in the database, then this is not an issue. However, 50 000 documents later this could lead to poor performance of your Views.

So, let’s say that you have “Optimize Document Table Map” selected in the Notes Database Properties, the following will happen:

When indexing a certain View, Notes will only search through all records in the Database that were created using the Form that’s specified in the View Selection Formula. This means that if you have 5 Forms in the Database, and 5 000 records for each Form, Notes will only search through 5 000 records for a specific Form to index the Notes View. Can you imagine the Response Time

So, where to enable this setting? If you right-click on your Notes Database and go to the “Database Properties”, click on the last tab. You will see towards the Top that you can check the option “Optimize Document Table Map”

2 Important Notes when enabling this Setting:

1. I’ve had varied results with enabling this property and just expecting it to work. I highly recommend compacting the database after enabling this Setting just to be sure.

2. In order for this setting to Work, it’s very important that your View Selection Formula for your Notes View specifies the Form Name.

i.e. If your View Selection Formula only says Select FirstName = “John”, then you won’t see a performance boost on the view. However, if you say Select Form = “Person” & FirstName = “John”, this will work because you are referencing the Form Name inside the View, which if you think about it, makes sense.

I hope this helps everyone. Happy Coding

John