WIndows search 2012 edb file size increasing - Projectwise indexing

Welcome to hell. This has been the bane of my existence for over a year. The ultimate solution is (hopefully) the Azure Search feature Bentley announced that moves the Windows Search parts of full text indexing to Azure and you never have to hear about EDB files again.

Microsoft has a tool that can be used to compress and optimize the EDB file:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/it-pro/windows-server-2012-R2-and-2012/hh875652(v=ws.11)

We ran this nightly and it would still occasionally go corrupt, get deleted and start over (therefore breaking all full text search until rebuilt).

Our script that was finally stable followed the following steps:

• stop integration server service on the indexing server
• stop windows search service
• snap a shadow copy of the edb file
• disable windows search server (if we didn't do this it would eventually restart itself and immediately corrupt the database)
• run the esentutl indicated in documentation above (it ships with windows so should already be installed)
• snap another shadow copy of the edb file
• re-enable windows search
• restart windows search
• restart the indexing service

We needed a hard drive that 3x the size of the EDB file for all of this to work properly, plus a secondary drive for the shadow copies.

Our EDB file was (depending on the day) between 100-200 GB in size. We were working on breaking that up into 3 full text indexing servers to support our 20 datasources in order to get the EDB files smaller, and less single point of failure, but we're hoping to shift to Azure Search instead.

Kevin

Thank you very much indeed Kevin. Do you have some idea when Azure search might be available ? I understood that it might be supported in the latest ProjectWise Server version downloadable now ? V10.00.03.140 ? thx

It’s available as a technology preview in the latest. I’m still working on setting it up in our Dev environment.

because this leverages Bentley’s Azure environment there may be special licensing requirements as well, I’m not familiar with that aspect.

It’s available as a technology preview in the latest. I’m still working on setting it up in our Dev environment.

because this leverages Bentley’s Azure environment there may be special licensing requirements as well, I’m not familiar with that aspect.