Indexes that you seldom use can impair performance by causing unnecessary overhead. If you do not want to delete an index that is seldom used, then you should deactivate it. Deactivating an index eliminates the processing overhead associated with the index, but it does not free up the index disk space. For information on how to deactivate indexes, see OpenEdge Data Management: Database Administration. To learn deactivate indexes using SQL, see OpenEdge Data Management: SQL Reference.