HCL recommends you disable Updall if you use DBMT, but should you?

DBMT (Domino database maintenance tool) is a fantastic feature in modern HCL Domino that is used for managing and maintaining Domino databases. DBMT performs various tasks such as compacting, fixing, updating, and indexing Domino databases. Specifically, DBMT runs copy-style compact operations, purges deletion stubs, expires soft deleted entries, updates views, reorganizes folders, merges full-text indexes, and updates unread lists.

It allows you to specify how many threads should be used for compaction and updating, which maximizes performance on computers with multiple processors.

Now, HCL recommends you disable compact and updall when you implement it, and that makes sense, but you need to remember it performs a copy-style compact, so it will take the database offline while it works. Hint: Always have your databases in a cluster if you need 24 * 7 access.

You can schedule it yourself via a program document or, better still, use something like our Domino Optimizer product to do it all for you.

When you schedule DBMT, you can specify how long it gets to run using the time-limit option. There is, however, a really big problem with this option, and that's the with the updall component of DBMT, which completely ignores this setting and continues merrily on its way. This is a problem if you are attempting to control the window of time you want DBMT to operate in.

So this got us thinking. Why not just set the DBMT updall threads to zero and leave the old-fashioned updall server task to run as it once did to keep the indexes and views up-to-date?

We love your thoughts on this approach.

Cheers