web
You’re offline. This is a read only version of the page.
close
Skip to main content

Announcements

No record found.

News and Announcements icon
Community site session details

Community site session details

Session Id :
Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Small and medium business | Business Central, N... / Business Central Table...
Small and medium business | Business Central, N...
Answered

Business Central Table Indexes taking up Massive Space in Database

(8) ShareShare
ReportReport
Posted on by CS-15051251-0 59
Hi All, 
 
We have a client, who has a couple tables in their cloud instance of Business Central, which are taking up a majority of their database space. Specifically, they are concerned with the space that the indexes for these tables are taking up. 
 
The two main culprits are the "Value Entry" and "G/L Entry" tables. They do not seem to have any additional keys defined on them apart from the standard BC keys, of which there are many (20 for G/L Entries and 15 for Value).
 
To take "Value Entry" as an example, they have ~27M records, which takes up 27M KB of space just for the indexes. This is shaking out to around 1KB of DB space to index a single record. Looking at some other clients, it seems more normal for a 0.5 KB being sufficient per record. 
 
At any rate, does anyone have any tips on resolving this issue? It seems you can clean up indexes via SQL Server with Business Central On-Prem, but there does not look like there are any means of doing this with the Cloud application.  Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
 
Thanks!
Categories:
Dynamics 365 Business Central
I have the same question (0)
  • Verified answer
    YUN ZHU Profile Picture
    YUN ZHU 98,240 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at
    Hi, as of now, the Cloud version only offers the following three database management features, primarily for troubleshooting. It lacks features like rebuilding indexes, as found in the On-Premise version.
    You can submit this idea to Microsoft.
    Missing a feature? Post or vote for ideas on: aka.ms/BCIdeas
     
    Thanks.
    ZHU
  • Verified answer
    Alex A Profile Picture
    Alex A 3,017 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at
    Hello, these two tables are core to the financial system. You can submit a support case to Microsoft, but if you're not sure how then your Partner can surely do it for you.
     
    There are maintenance plans that run nightly/weekly that rebuild the indexes, but they might be able to have a DBA look at it for you.
     
     
     
    Regards,

     
    (Don't forget to mark the answer below)
  • CS-15051251-0 Profile Picture
    CS-15051251-0 59 on at
    @Alex A Thanks for the response. Are the maintenance plans you mention implemented by Microsoft support, or do we have the ability to implement those ourselves? 
     
    Thanks
  • Suggested answer
    Alex A Profile Picture
    Alex A 3,017 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at
    Basically, every good SQL Database installation will have had a maintenance plan configured when it was first setup for your NAV/BC application. So, any implementation should have this even if Microsoft did it on their side. But since they control it, we're sort of dependent on them to look into it, and see if there is anything odd about these particular indexes.
  • CS-15051251-0 Profile Picture
    CS-15051251-0 59 on at
    Hi Folks, thanks for the feedback, I just wanted to throw one more piece into the picture here. 
     
    I am just wondering if these numbers and ratios look funky to anyone? Specifically, the first Value Entry table shows around 90% of the space taken up by the table is taken up by the index, with the space requirements for indexing around 8 times that of the actual data. 
     
    What is strange is that in a different company, the indexes for Value Entries only require about 3.5 times the space as the data. 
     
    Any thoughts would be much appreciated.
     
    Thanks!
  • Suggested answer
    Alex A Profile Picture
    Alex A 3,017 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at
    If you have access to SQL Server Management Studio a qualified Database Administrator can Rebuild the index.
      Right-click the index => Rebuild (or use ALTER INDEX REBUILD)
     
     
  • CS-15051251-0 Profile Picture
    CS-15051251-0 59 on at
    @Alex A Hey Alex, unfortunately this is SaaS, so we do not have SQL Serve access.
  • Verified answer
    Alex A Profile Picture
    Alex A 3,017 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at
    Yes Sir, but that is what needs to be done. So see if you can get a ticket to Microsoft through your Partner. Peace.

Under review

Thank you for your reply! To ensure a great experience for everyone, your content is awaiting approval by our Community Managers. Please check back later.

Helpful resources

Quick Links

Introducing the 2026 Season 1 community Super Users

Congratulations to our 2026 Super Stars!

Congratulations to our 2025 Community Spotlights

Thanks to all of our 2025 Community Spotlight stars!

Congratulations to the February Top 10 Community Leaders

These are the community rock stars!

Leaderboard > Small and medium business | Business Central, NAV, RMS

#1
OussamaSabbouh Profile Picture

OussamaSabbouh 2,055 Super User 2026 Season 1

#2
YUN ZHU Profile Picture

YUN ZHU 1,063 Super User 2026 Season 1

#3
Dhiren Nagar Profile Picture

Dhiren Nagar 1,014 Super User 2026 Season 1

Last 30 days Overall leaderboard

Featured topics

Product updates

Dynamics 365 release plans