When was the last time you thought about using a Keyword Search? Probably not lately, especially if you have upgraded to Time Matters 9 and adopted using the full text search mechanism. In any case, the Keyword Index feature is only useful for Professional versions of Time Matters through version 8. 

If you are not using the Keyword Search feature you should make sure you disable Keyword Indexing. Enabling Keyword Indexing can create a significant amount of run-time overhead. Extra database updates will occur every time a record is created, changed or deleted.

The Keyword Indexing option is located under "Program Setup, Update, Keyword Indexing". You might want to have a look to see what's going on behind the scenes.

Thanks to a devoted SharpShooter customer who reported that a quick glance at the SharpShooter Database Analytics Report identified the Keyword table as being a top consumer of data overhead.

Identifying and eliminating wasted data space can significantly improve the run-time performance of Time Matters.

I had the recent opportunity to assist a business partner (and CIC) Miike Holcomb with the resolution of a performance issue his client was having after upgrading to Time Matters 9. Opening a form was taking an astounding 30 seconds! And no, the previous version was not this slow. All forms exhibited the behavior regardless of whether the user was adding, changing or deleting a record.

Mike relied on his background as the former Manager of Time Matters Quality Control to begin stepping through troubleshooting techniques to identify the undesired behavior. He ultimately narrowed it down to the "template" table. Mike and I ultimately identified the AutoText codes in the template table were carriing an overhead of 32k per code. Yes, not the 20 or 30 bytes they should consume.

Apparently, the TM form subsystem loads the AutoText codes every time a form opens. In this case, 80x32k = 2,560k of "mostly empty data" mushing through the system. Granted, it's empty string space and is faster than complex data. The result is however 15 seconds to open an empty form. We cleaned up the AutoText data and the user was back to sub-second form loading.

Historically, AutoText codes were only supported in Billing forms. They were subsequently migrated as a new feature, functional on all forms in Time Matters. Subsequently, the data import process is not truncating these codes (removing trailing spaces) when they are imported into the newer version. This is not an issue for AutoText codes added subsequent to the import. 

We are adding a test for excessive wasted data space in an upcomiong update to SharpShooter.