Keys and indexes in Service Manager

ITSMA Service Management keys are abstract entities that provide a logical view of the indexes in your RDBMS. When you create Service Management logical keys, the server creates corresponding indexes on the back-end RDBMS. The benefits of using Service Management logical keys are:

• They allow administrators a means to manage and move indexes from one environment to another (for example, from a test environment to a production environment)
• They allow administrators a means to move indexes from one RDBMS type to another (for example, from a SQL Server Express edition demonstration RDBMS to a supported RDBMS in a development environment)

In RDBMS terms, Service Management keys provide constraints on column data as well as an index of the records in a table that improves query performance. From the Service Management side, logical key definitions are one part of a database dictionary record. The full database dictionary record also includes field and column mappings. Typically, you will use database dictionary records to manage and move both logical keys and field mappings at the same time.

Currently, Service Management can only push keys as indexes on an RDBMS. It cannot read existing indexes (pull) from the RDBMS and create the corresponding logical keys. Service Management can still use existing indexes on an RDBMS without the indexes being defined as logical keys. Any query issued against an indexed column still gets a performance benefit. However you can only take advantage of the features of logical keys if you create them from Service Management.

Service Management uses the following logic to create indexes:

Service Management key type	Type of index created on the RDBMS
Primary	Primary
Unique	Index with unique constraint
No Nulls	Index
No Duplicates	Index
Nulls and Duplicates	Index
IR index	None Service Management directly manages IR Index keys

You can define Service Management keys from either the System Definition utility or the Table Definition utility.