Disable text indexing for a subset of task tables - Support and Troubleshooting

Disable text indexing for a subset of task tables Issue  Sometimes you may want to disable text indexing for a specific table. Normally you would achieve this by by unchecking the "Text Index" flag on the Dictionary Entry [sys_dictionary] record for the Collection record for a table.

However, if the table has a Table Per Hierarchy (TPH) table structure (eg., task), unchecking the "Text Index" flag for the Task collection dictionary entry will disable text indexing for ALL task types (eg., incident_task, problem, change_request, change_task, sc_request, sc_req_item, sc_task, etc.).

This article describes how you can disable text indexing for only a subset of task tables.

Release ALL

Resolution WARNING

Please note that if you follow the steps below and then decide later that you wanted to undo them you would actually need to rebuild the indexes for the table again.

Completely rebuilding the text indexes for a table can be very time consuming and also impact performance. The single largest factor to consider is the number of records in the target table being re-indexed. While the index is being rebuilt the "text index events process" job will not be processing newer text index events which are flowing into the sysevent table. This can mean that records that are newly created/updated cannot be found by the terms that should return them until they have been processed.

If you are going to rebuild the indexes for a table and you are on a London or greater release then you can use the option to reubuild the indexes in place which will preserve the existing indexes as we reprocess each record. This allows records to still be found while the re-indexing is occurring. However, newly inserted and updated records will not be found by those new terms until the sysevents for them are processed after the re-indexing of the table is complete. For more information on indexing in place please see:

https://docs.servicenow.com/csh?topicname=real-time-reindexing.html&version=latest

If you wanted to disable text indexing for just the Requested Item [sc_req_item] table:

1. Navigate to the System Definition > Dictionary module.

2. In the list, filter on the Table that you want to disable and where Type is Collection

3. Open the record

4. In the Attributes section, click on the New button.

5. Enter the following values:

Attribute: No text index

Value: true

6. Click on the Submit button.

7. Repeat steps 1-6 for any other table for which you want to disable text indexing.

For a quick programatic way to do this, check out KB0656708 , which provides a sample script that can be run in the System Definition > Scripts - Background module.

Related Links KB0732166 - Enable text indexing for a table

KB0723580 - Table Structures FAQ

KB0656708 - How to bulk update attributes for all columns in a table

KB0687779 - Making The Post Clone Regenerate Text Index Process Faster