Dynamics Business Central, which is inherited from Dynamics NAV (formerly Navision), has a unique capability called the SIFT feature. These fields serve as the basis for FlowFields (automatically accumulating totals) and are unique to Business Central. This feature allows Business Central to provide almost instantaneous responses to user inquiries for summed data, which are calculated on the fly at runtime and are related to the SumIndexFields. The cost is primarily that of the time required to maintain the SIFT indexes when a table is updated.
Business Central maintains SIFT totals using SQL Server indexed views. An indexed view is a view that has been preprocessed and stored. Business Central creates one indexed view for each enabled SIFT key. SIFT keys are enabled and disabled through the MaintainSIFTIndex property. SQL Server maintains the contents of the view when any changes are made to the base table, unless the MaintainSIFTIndex property is set to No.
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