Rebuilding Sitecore Core Index on Azure search throwing exceeding index limitation exception

Question

I am using Azure search service (Pricing Tier: Standard with 15 Million docs/partition) connected to Sitecore 8.2 instance. It is throwing me an error when I try to build Sitecore core index:

Exception: Sitecore.ContentSearch.Azure.Http.Exceptions.AzureSearchServiceRESTCallException
Message: {"error":{"code":"","message":"The request is invalid. Details: definition : Invalid index: The index contains 1028 field(s). An index can have at most 1000 fields.\r\n"}}

I understand that there is a limitation of 1000 field per index. Info here

Is there any work around for this ?

Answer 1

Azure Search has an upper limit of 1000 fields per index, even for the top tier. In the default Sitecore indexes, all template fields are added as a field in the index.

In a clean Sitecore installation with WFFM and EXM, there at just below 1000 fields in the core database, and just below 400 fields in the master and web index by default.

This means that almost any addition to the core database will have you hit the limit.

Sitecore has provided a patch to "fix" this issue for the core database. It is a config patch, excluding a range of standard templates from the index.

For the master and web databases, you have to trim the indexes by hand. For our need, we excluded all custom templates from the indexes and created custom indexes where needed.

This means that when using Azure Search, you are required to continuously trim all your indexes to not hit the 1000 fields limit.

Answer 2

This is a limitation from Azure Search.

If you have this issue for a custom index I recommend you to split the index into multiple indexes to have less than 1000 fields per index.

If you have this issue for a Sitecore index I recommend to investigate what fields can be removed from the Sitecore index.