What's New: Enhanced Index Management (2026 release wave 1)

Overview

The video explains how Business Central now exposes index information and control in the client. From the table information page, users can drill down to per-index details for each table and company, including index size, usage, and which fields are in or included in an index.

It also demos turning indexes on and off at runtime, which resembles the C/SIDE experience. Indexes can ship disabled by default and be enabled per company where the functionality and data justify the storage and update cost. The video closes with the new lifecycle telemetry events and documentation links.

Key points

• The Table Data Information Management page lets you drill down from table information to per-index data, per table and per company, including index size and advanced usage information.
• A detailed view shows which fields are in an index and which are included, so you can judge whether it covers a query without reading source code. It needs technical knowledge to interpret.
• Indexes can be turned on and off in the client at runtime. Some cannot be turned off, for example the system ID index, which is defined as unique.
• Turning off an index removes it from SQL, saving storage and making table updates cheaper.
• Enabling an index that was created disabled is queued and applied in the next maintenance window in SaaS. In local Docker or on-prem it happens immediately.
• Indexes can ship disabled by default and be enabled per company, avoiding storage and update costs for indexes a company does not need.
• Telemetry events LC 63 and 64 record index enable and disable done through the client, alongside existing lifecycle events for AL-based index operations. They are documented at ak.ms/bctelemetry.

Features

AL objects mentioned

As heard in the captions. A name that matches one object page by exact type and name links to it; the others stay as named.

• page “Table Information page” at 1:22
• page “Table Data Information Management page” at 0:58

Not found in BC28-30: page “Table Information page”, page “Table Data Information Management page”.

Quotes

• 0:37 “you can now analyze your data performance and based on that you can make it faster um and maybe also save something on your”
• 3:39 “the full kind of C/SIDE experience is coming now where you can now turn indexes on and off directly in the client”
• 4:10 “If we start here with the system ID, it is defined as being unique. It would be a semantically different experience if you turned”
• 5:16 “those indices you have normally not been able to turn on but you can now turn them on here”
• 5:16 “We say here they will be in queued and turned on in the subsequent maintenance window overnight depending on local time.”
• 6:08 “when we develop the base app, we are trying to guess the types of indexes that would make sense, but we don’t necessarily know”
• 7:51 “I want to highlight what I think is a new ability that we haven’t had since C/SIDE and that is the ability to create”

Presenters (as heard): Kenny Pontoppidan, Mass Gram.