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Customer experience | Sales, Customer Insights,...
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ActivityPointerBase Table Indexes and Blocking

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Posted on by 15

CRM 2011 on Premise

I've inherited quite a mess.  Our ActivityPointerBase table has 64 indexes with 42 of those indexes never being used.  These were all created by CRM itself.  Each of those indexes has been updated millions of times.  In fact, our CRM database has almost 500 indexes in this same situation.  Millions of updates, no seeks or scans.  They also use about 200 gigs worth of hard drive space.

We are constantly getting blocking on the ActivityPointerBase table which brings the whole CRM system to a halt.  Essentially shutting down our business.  The queries doing the blocking seem to come from the email router itself.  

I have seen many forum posts saying editing or removing an OOB index in CRM is unsupported, but these things seem to be dead weight.  Waiting for each one of these indexes to be updated causes major performance issues.  The risks seem to be it's possible a process or stored procedure exists that references an index by name.  

Can I disable these things for a test and possibly remove them?  Will CRM just recreate them?  

What does the index pre-fixes mean? ndx (non-cluster index?), IX(index?), fdnx? 

Can I offload emails to a different database?  

We have a huge project in flight to upgrade our CRM version to the newest version.  Does 365 handle indexes any differently?

Thanks for your time and I truly appreciate any guidance you can give!

  • Suggested answer
    Nico Lindsey Profile Picture
    15 on at
    RE: ActivityPointerBase Table Indexes and Blocking

    Thanks for your advice.  I'll go ahead and open a ticket.

  • Verified answer
    kunihih Profile Picture
    on at
    RE: ActivityPointerBase Table Indexes and Blocking

    >>Can I disable these things for a test and possibly remove them?  Will CRM just recreate them?  

    As you know it is unsupported to manually delete/disable OOB indexes so I cant recommend that you do so. That said there are some indexes that can be removed/altered through your customization settings. For instance removing columns from quick find views will reduce the size of quick find related indexes and removing relationships between entities can remove foreign key indexes. I recommend that you raise a ticket to Microsoft with a list of indexes that you are interested in removing. Microsoft may be able to reduce bloat on a case by case basis.

    >> Can I offload emails to a different database?  

    Unfortunately this is not possible.

    >> We have a huge project in flight to upgrade our CRM version to the newest version.  Does 365 handle indexes any differently?

    There have been some performance improvements but nothing too dramatic.

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