Domino 8: 101 - Prevent Simple Search and Deferred Sort

The two items I will discuss below are enhancements to Domino 8 that may impact disk space and/or memory utilization on your servers. The first may also impact your end-users, so you should be aware of the caveats of enabling it.

Prevent Simple Search:
This option is found in the Advanced tab of the Database Properties dialog. It's called "Don't allow simple search" in that dialog. This will prevent someone from performing a search in a database that is not full-text indexed. Performing a search on a database without an index is a very time consuming process and the results are generally not as you would expect when compared to the search time and results returned from an indexed database. Enabling this option will prevent this type of search. However, many end-users may not know that they are doing this (by not noticing, or caring, that the database is not indexed) and will be used to performing searches. If you enable this option on mail files, be aware that you may receive many requests to create full-text indexes for those end-users who may have been performing simple searches. Creating these indexes will add to the overall drive space that is needed on your server.

Deferred Sort Index Creation:
This option can be a fairly decent space saver on your server. It is a design property, "Defer index creation until first use", of sortable columns and is visible under the "Click on column header to sort" option. What this option does is prevents the indexing of specific columns when the view is created. For example, most users may never sort their mail file using the Response Icons column. Prior to having this option, however, that column's sort index would have been included in the space used by the view.

So exactly how much space can this save?

Let me use my mail file as an example. After perusing through Designer to see how this option is enabled by default in the mail8 template, I notice that the Subject, Size, and Response columns have this option enabled. So, after purging the view index of my All Documents view (~1,500 docs), I opened that view. The initial size was 1,147,984 bytes (so, just over 1MB). I then sorted by the Subject column and the size increased 28%. I then proceeded to sort by the Size column and the increase was another 29%. Finally, I sorted the Response column and the size increased another 28%. In total, my view index for All Documents is now 2,132,224 bytes. This represents an 85% increase over the initial size of the view. Of course, with a relatively small mail file this will not have as much impact, but just imagine the savings with a much larger file.

I'm hoping that this "Domino 8: 101" series will be helpful as you continue your planning to upgrade to Domino 8 and evaluating the things that you, as an Administrator, will need to know. There have been many features added in Domino 8.0 - even though it was mostly a client-focused release. As you can see from previous posts in this series, IBM has a focus on saving space and time with Domino 8 and beyond. Just this week, an additional NSF compression algorithm was announced with 8.0.1 and there is more planned for Domino Next.