NAV 2013 | No more Indexhinting

By Marije Brummel, founder of NAV-Skills

UPDATE: I’ve heard this was fixed in 2016. Dit not test this myself.

Well, that sounds cool right? Like, never index hinting in NAV anymore after all the discussions in the past.

http://mibuso.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=13154&hilit=hinting

http://www.mibuso.com/dlinfo.asp?FileID=896

With NAV 2013 it is no longer possible to setup index hints using the $ndo$dbconfig table.

Does it mean it’s no longer nescesairy.

Unfortunately not.

I found out about this during an upgrade of one of my customers from NAV2009 RTC to NAV2013.

We experienced extremely slow performance in an area where NAV2009 was much faster than NAV2013. And here I promised better performance… DAMN.

Off course with our perfect documentation (not) it took some time to figure out it might be that index hinting was used in NAV2009 to force SQL using an index it would not use normally.

The process is selecting shipments to be planned in a trip for a taxicompany. We use a common method to select a shipment using the user id, just like you would when applying customer and vendor ledger entries. When selected it’s an extremely selective field (only one or two record of a million have this value) but SQL does not pick it up because… because… shoot me, I don’t know why not. DAMN 2.

So with index hinting no longer possible (confirmed by Microsoft, done on purpose, by redesign) I needed to be creative.

The solution is to save a pointer to a shipment in a second table called “Selected Shipment”. All shipment that need to be planned in a trip are temporarily stored there and picked up and deleted afterwards. Depending on the architecture of your transaction this could even be done in a temporary table and/or a single instance codeunit.

So recap: no more indexhinting, be carefull with upgrades and creative with solutions.

And PS: The general performance of NAV 2013 is AWESOME!!!