IndexTool
IndexTool.exe (which replaces the now deprecated IndexCheck tool) is a freely available Axiell command-line tool especially for quickly creating full text indexes and it does it substantially faster than Designer can, after you've set the Enable full text index option for all .inf's in your data folder and saved that setting. From the version of July 2023 (for Collections 1.17) it is able to create normal indexes too (for databases that haven't been Full Text-enabled), also faster than Designer can. (So new tables will be created if they don't exist yet.) Full text and non-full text indexes for metadata tables are supported from IndexTool version 7.13.1.6699 (and in Designer too). However, indexed links are not supported by the tool yet, so you should use Designer if this type of index appears in your application (too).
Preferably place the tool files in a separate folder near SQL Server but that is not required. If the operation of the tool is aborted mid-process, it can continue where it left off at a later time because it stores a continuation file in the \data folder of the Collections application so the user must have write/create file access to this folder, or this part of the program will not work. (When you restart an aborted process, provide the same arguments but don't use -r or -x, otherwise it will reset the start priref to 1 instead of using the value from the continuation file.)
The SQL user configured in the database .inf files must have access rights to create tables and install user defined SQL types.
For safety, create a backup of your database first. Then run the tool from a command-line window and specify any of the following options as its arguments (include the dashes).
--help |
Show command line help. However, the command IndexTool help or IndexTool --help only shows which so-called verbs (a way to group command-line options) are available, namely:
On the command-line, a verb (if provided) must be entered between IndexTool and the arguments for the verb. |
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--version |
Show IndexTool version number. |
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-p or --data-path |
Path to application \data folder. Use this option to specify the path to the Collections \data folder. The user running the tool should preferably have write access to this folder since the tool will attempt to create a file in this location (continuation.json). |
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-r or --reindex |
Indexes all records in the database. This ignores any continuation information that might exist for this database. This option also skips rebuilding the SQL database schema for the indexes. Omit this option to resume an aborted indexing operation. Use this option when you don't want to erase the old data. The result is the same as with -x, but -r might be a little bit slower. -x deletes the tables, -r overwrites the tables. |
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-x or --drop-index |
Drops and recreates the full text index tables (in case the created indexes need to be redone for some reason). This option instructs the tool to drop any existing full text indexes and recreate the full text index table for every database table that it is processing. Use this option to start the indexing process from the very beginning with fresh and empty tables. |
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-l or --log-path |
Enable and create log file at this path. Include the desired file name, something like mylog.txt for example. (If you specify the same file name repeatedly, then new log information will be added to the existing file.) By default (if you do not use the option), the tool will create a log file with a name formatted like indextool_<ISOdate>_<time>.log in the tool folder: it will also always print the log to the terminal window before it exits. Use the option to specify your own path and file name of the log file to which to log all tool events. You must have write/create access to that folder. 2022-06-02 18:37:46.0079 | Databases completed successfully: "collect,letters,people,settings,supplang,thesau" 2022-06-02 18:37:46.0079 | Databases skipped/empty: "auction,borrcat,borrower,budget,circuit,collname,conserva,copies,costs, currency,document,exhibit,fees,fines,littheme,loanhist,loans,location, media,orders,orditems,packgtyp,price,rameau,reprlang,reprordr,research, reserv,retention,sericopy,series,statics,stock,subscrip,taxonom,transpor" 2022-06-02 18:37:46.1743 | Wrote continuation list (42) to path "..\data\continuation.json" |
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-d or --database |
Whitespace separated list of one or more database tables. This option lets the user specify which database tables should be included in the indexing process. Typically you want all tables to be indexed and you specify that with an asterisk (*). --database <database name>:<tag_list>:<first_priref-last_priref> Note that for full text indexing, specifying a tag which has a Text or Free text index definition (so it will be included in the full text index table), will implicitly also include all other tags with a Text or Free text definition in the relevant database table definition during the indexing action, similar to the (--fulltext) option. To omit the tags, just enter two colons: Either the first or last record number can be omitted too, like this: -d <database>:<tags>:<first_priref> -d <database>:<tags>:<-last_priref> |
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-f or --fulltext |
This option (available from 1.11.1) instructs the tool to only perform Full Text indexing. For Full Text enabled .inf's, using this option is recommended because otherwise indextool will also reindex all irrelevant indexes, wich takes much longer. This option is inclusive with specified tags for option -d as well, so both can be specified at the same time, e.g.: -f -d collect:Ds |
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--settings |
This option (available from 1.11.1) will create a file called indextool.settings (a json file) where some internal values can be adjusted, buffers and such, the tool will pick up the file if it exists or use the defaults if the file doesn't exist. For advanced users only. ContinuationTimer - By default, the continuation file is updated at the end when the tool exits, either from an unrecoverable error or cleanly when nothing went wrong. The internal setting called ContinuationTimer defaults to zero for the default behaviour, but if you change it, the continuation information will be committed to file based on the value in seconds. So don’t set it at 1 or anything, maybe every 60 seconds is better (or even longer). Use this option only if the continuation file isn't created after an error. Put the value back to zero to disable the in-between continuation info commits. |
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--log-debug |
This option (available from 1.11.1) will make the tool log a bit more information than it does normally. |
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--log-trace |
This option (not implemented yet, for future use), will eventually log details about every record. |
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-b or --bulk-mode |
This option (available from 1.11.1) will attempt to set the SQL Server database recovery log option to BULK_LOGGED instead of FULL during indexing in order to minimize the SQL server database log file size. |
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--profile |
You can create and load profiles. This stores the used command line options in a name file. So if you have a long command line and you know you're going to run it again in the future, you can add --profile <name> and it will be stored so you can run the indextool again with that profile name instead of specifying all arguments again. When you create a profile, only the profile will be created: the index command itself will not be executed, so you will have to load the profile to execute it. To manage profiles (list, load, delete) you must use the profile verb (not --profile for the index verb) on the command line: indextool profile --load <profile_name without extension> will load the specified, earlier created profile and run it. Instead of --load you can also use -l. indextool profile --list will list the available profiles. --list can be replaced by -e (stands for enumerate). indextool profile --delete <profile_name without extension> will delete the profile. --delete equals -d. |
Examples:
indexTool.exe -p "..\data" -d * |
Index all the database tables (this is also the default if -d is not specified) and create a log file. After running the tool, check in SQL Server Management Studio that each .inf now has a full text index table: these have names like dbo.collect_fulltext, dbo.thesau_fulltext, etc. If you already had the relevant database opened in SQL Server Management Studio, you may have to use the Refresh function in there to refresh the list of tables and see the new ones. |
indextool.exe -p "..\data" -x -d * -l "..\logs\mylog.txt" |
If due to errors not all of the full text indexes have been created, you can try again and add the -x option to drop the earlier created ones and recreate all full text indexes. |
indexTool.exe -p "C:\Axiell\data" -d collect people |
Index only collect and people. |
indexTool.exe -p "C:\Axiell\data" --database event- |
Index all database tables except for the event table. |
Additional Information:
The tool will automatically shut down when all processing has completed, however the tool can be interrupted at any point and shut down using the F10 key. Ctrl+C will not work and has no effect. From version 1.11.1, the tool also writes a file called indextool_rejected_fields<date>.csv with all the values that failed validation during indexing.
The tool is a fully multi-threaded application and will utilize all available CPU cores, however the tool is not heavy on the CPU as most time is spent transferring data from and to the SQL server. The tool will index two databases concurrently and there is currently no way of specifying any advanced indexing settings.
The user interface is fully resizable, and the mouse cursor can be used to scroll the list of database tables during the reindexing process.
IndexTool will not do any comparing of existing values in the index to values in records, like the now deprecated IndexCheck tool did: the old data in the indexes will simply be overwritten and the SQL queries which retrieve that data, run for batches of 64 records each, not per key or anything like that. The only communication back from SQL server to IndexTool relates to unique indexes, in which case the query returns how many violations of uniqueness were found.