Since the beginning of NAV (formerly Navision), one of its unique capabilities has been the SIFT feature. These fields serve as the basis for FlowFields (automatically accumulating totals) and are unique to NAV. This feature allows NAV to provide almost instantaneous responses to user inquiries for summed data, calculated on the fly at runtime, related to the SumIndexFields. The cost is primarily that of the time required to maintain the SIFT indexes when a table is updated.
NAV 2017 maintains SIFT totals using SQL Server indexed views. An indexed view is a view that has been preprocessed and stored. NAV 2017 creates one indexed view for each enabled SIFT key. SIFT keys are enabled and disabled through the MaintainSIFTIndex ...
