Full Text Index on separate Drive

Daniel Nashed  4 October 2011 08:32:17

Since 8.5.3 (available as of today) we have the option to put the Full Text Index on another drive. We have asked about it many times for many years and finally got this functionality.
The notes.ini parameter e.g. FTBasePath=d:\full_text can be used to switch the starting directory for the full text index from data directory to a different directory or drive.

It makes a lot of sense to separate the FT Index from the NSF data in larger environments.
There are a couple of reasons

- FT Index causes a lot of file-system fragmentation
- At some point even with DAOS on larger environments the file-system for NSF data can be quite big and separating FT and NSF would make sense.
- When using snap-shot backup reducing the size of the file-system containing NSF would make a lot of sense
- From I/O point of view on larger servers with a lot of FT data this can also improve performance

This setting does only make sense for larger environments

To migrate your FT index to a separate drive you need the following steps:

- Set the notes.ini FTBasePath=d:\full_text
- Run updall -f to rebuild all FT indexes.

This will automatically delete the old FT index and re-create it on the new drive.

-- Daniel

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