What is the difference between Index Management and Flat Catalog

[mustafa_abdel a]

Hello Guys,

I am newbie in Magento, and I want to know What is the difference between Index Management and Flat Catalog because i am confusing between them as all of them create Tables on the fly.

And i want to know also why Flat Catalog is not recommended now and why it causes performance degradation in spite of it is used for improve performance by creating Tables on the fly.

Thanks

[Vimal Kumar · Accepted solution]

Hi @mustafa_abdel a 

Flat catalog and index management both are different things.

Index management keeps the different indexed data into the database tables.

But in catalog management magento create a flat tables for product and category and keep all eav catalog data into those tables. But it is not recommended for magento latest version due to some performance concerns.

For more info

https://docs.magento.com/m2/ce/user_guide/system/index-management.html

https://docs.magento.com/m2/ce/user_guide/catalog/catalog-flat.html

I hope it will help you!

[NoFrillsCloud]

According to this Help Center article:-

https://support.magento.com/hc/en-us/articles/360034631192

It states that flat indexers of Magento 2.1.x and above can cause heavy SQL load and site performance issues as well as long running and stuck cron jobs.