Configure Quick Find options for the organization

Applies To: Dynamics 365 (on-premises), Dynamics CRM 2016

The Quick Find search feature provides quick results to users who enter simple queries to commonly-searched entities. You can tailor the Quick Find functionality by selecting record return limits, an indexing method, and which entities are included.

In this topic

Choose the method used for Quick Find indexing

What system administrators should consider before enabling or disabling full-text indexing

Enable or disable full-text indexing for Quick Find

Choose the method used for Quick Find indexing

By default, Microsoft Dynamics 365 uses the same search functionality as in previous releases, which is based mostly on string matches.

System administrators have the option to use full-text indexing for Quick Find. We recommend you enable full-text indexing for Quick Find because it can provide a better search experience by improving query performance. Full-text search also uses more sophisticated indexing methods that include support for linguistic-based searches and superior relevance ranking.

While the previous search method (standard indexing) returns results based on literal matches, full-text indexing returns linguistic-based matches. For example the term service can return similar words like servicing and serviced. More information: Full-Text Search (SQL Server)

To find information, standard indexing often requires users to add wildcards to search strings. This results in poor performance for large data sets, due to the required full table scans instead of using an index. Full-text indexing doesn’t use wildcards, which leads to improved query and system performance. Notice that, although users can include wildcards in search strings, wildcards are ignored.

What system administrators should consider before enabling or disabling full-text indexing

Changes made to how and when Microsoft Dynamics 365 data is indexed are not initiated until a certain time of day, typically during the late evening. Before you enable or disable full-text indexing, consider the following:

• Because indexing is a maintenance job that runs one time every day, it can take up to 24 hours for the system to enable or disable full-text search, or add and remove find columns.

• When customizers add an item for Quick Find, such as a find column, the column data won’t appear in Quick Find search results until the next maintenance job completes. These items can still be discoverable through Quick Find searches, but will use the previous search method. Any columns that have not finished indexing for full-text will continue to use the standard indexing method for Quick Find searches. When indexing for a column completes, Quick Find will use full-text search. When full-text search for Quick Find is enabled, columns newly added to a Quick Find view will not have any indexing until the next maintenance job completes. This may cause poor Quick Find performance.

• Advanced Find search is not affected when you enable full-text indexing for Quick Find. Advanced Find will continue to use the same standard indexing that was available in previous releases of Microsoft Dynamics 365.

• Because full-text indexing for Quick Find uses SQL Server full-text indexing, certain queries made up of mostly or entirely common words (stopwords such as on, or, for, and, like) may not return expected results. SQL Server database administrators can create a custom stoplist or choose not to use a stoplist by dropping the system stoplist (not recommended). More information: TechNet: Configure and Manage Stopwords and Stoplists for Full-Text Search

For Microsoft Dynamics 365 (on-premises) administrators

When you enable full-text indexing for a database with a large number of columns, the size of the transaction log of the organization database may increase. We recommend you monitor and consider shrinking the transaction log. More information: MSDN: Manage the Size of the Transaction Log File

The aspects of resource consumption for full-text indexing are different from standard indexing, which may lead to SQL Server performance issues. Performance can especially be affected during the initial full-text indexing for all Quick Find text fields. More information: MSDN: Improve the Performance of Full-Text Indexes > Common Causes of Performance Issues

Index creation is a background process, so for large amounts of data serviced by busy SQL Servers, it can take several hours to multiple days for the full-text indexes to fully complete.

Enable or disable full-text indexing for Quick Find

Before you enable or disable full-text indexing for Quick Find, review the preceding What system administrators should consider before enabling or disabling full-text indexing section.

1. Go to Settings > Administration > System Settings >General tab.

2. Select Yes or No next to Enable full-text search for Quick Find.

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