How do you do indexing on Crm 2011?

Question

We are using Crm 2011 as our persistence layer and we noticed terrible performance.

We looked and lo and behold there are indexing, but the indexing is a composite of all the columns in the entity (well almost). Which makes it practically useless for all intent and purposes.

So how do I speed this up? I could go to the database and manually add an index, but I want to go through proper channels if possible and for future maintainability sake. I have shifted through Bing and Google and Stackoverflow but I couldn't find any info on this basic functionality.

Please help.

Answer 1

You can't solve this problem with Dynamics CRM. There is no way to configure indexing in Dynamics CRM, as it doesn't give you access to the underlying database - even not in a meta way.

If you have the need for indexes, you have to define them yourself in the database. This is supported by Microsoft (it is excluded from the unsupported modifications)

Modifications to the physical schema of the database, other than adding or updating indexes.

Keep in mind that due to the fact, that the application itself has no knowledge about the indexes, they are not part of the customizations and you have to deploy them yourself.

Answer 2

For the guidance on adding CRM 2011 indexes, following this link: Optimizing and Maintaining a Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Server Infrastructure

See the section labeled: Optimizing and Maintaining the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Database