Expanding the length of a keyword used all database resources

[George_Knight]

We had an issue recently where one of our OnBase admins expanded the field length of a keyword. This keyword is not part of an Autofill keyset and is not part of a keyword type group. It is used on documents to describe the legacy source system that the document came from during document conversion from legacy systems.

While the OnBase system was working on this change users began to notice that OnBase seemed to freeze or take an extremely long time to complete a normal task that normally takes milliseconds. 

This went on for several hours. During this time Hyland support was contacted and assisted in checking the system. Hyland stated the database was not in a locked state but that it was using all of it's resources to update the keyword length.

This keyword is used on many millions of conversion documents.

Does this process have to update this field on every existing document in the database that currently has this keyword? Could that be why it was so DB resource intensive?

[Isabel_Wendt · Accepted solution]

Hi George,

First of all, sorry to hear that you have this issue. 

I did a testing about it, to remember the message that OnBase shows when we have to change size of Keywords. I use a Alphanumeric data type and it was 20  and I changed for 40. The system showed me this message:

So according to this message. OnBase will remove an existing index and add it back after the keyword length has been modified. That is why it is taking a lot of time. 

If you have millions of records that might be why it is taking too much time and using a lot of DB resources.

Make sure that this process should not be interrupted for other process which are running in parallel or end users are not running complex queries.

[George_Knight]

Hi,

Thank you for the quick response. This makes sense. So if we need to make additional changes these will need to be done after hours when fewer users are on the system. 

I don't suppose Hyland has a way of doing this behind the scenes without this type of resource load if we need to change one that relates to millions of documents? 

[Isabel_Wendt]

Yes, that is for sure!

I think Hyland should have one, I will encourage you to talk with your account manager. I am pretty sure that they can offer other solutions to handle this massive change.  Also, you can have more options in the future to do that.