bcquality/community/knowledge/performance/choose-maintainsiftindex-by-read-write-ratio.md

bc-version	domain	keywords	technologies	countries	application-area
all	performance	maintainsiftindex sift calcsums flowfield write-cost	al	w1	all

Choose MaintainSIFTIndex by read-write ratio

Seed article. Ported from BC Code Intelligence to seed the community corpus. Community contributors are invited to expand or refine.

Description

MaintainSIFTIndex on a key decides whether the SIFT aggregate structure is updated on every INSERT, MODIFY, and DELETE that touches the key's fields. With Yes, CalcSums and FlowField reads are immediate — but every write pays the cost of updating the aggregate. With No, writes are cheaper but the first aggregate read after a change has to rebuild. Neither value is universally correct; the right choice depends on how often the aggregate is read versus how often the underlying rows are written.

Best Practice

Measure read-to-write ratios for the key's SIFT fields under realistic workloads. Set MaintainSIFTIndex = Yes only on keys whose aggregates are read far more often than the rows are written (reporting keys on reference tables, dashboards). Set No on keys whose rows are written heavily and whose aggregates are read rarely (transactional ledger entries, import-staging tables).

See sample: choose-maintainsiftindex-by-read-write-ratio.good.al.

Anti Pattern

Leaving MaintainSIFTIndex = Yes on every key by reflex or convenience. On write-heavy tables the cumulative cost turns every INSERT or MODIFY into several additional aggregate updates, and the impact compounds in batch imports and posting routines — often without any code-review signal that the property is the cause.