How to activate a Primary Index

How to activate a Primary Index
How to drop an inactive PRIMARY index
How to rebuild active indexes online like IDXBUILD

When marking a Primary Index inactive, first mark another of the active indexes as the Primary Index. This can be achieved through the Data Dictionary or by loading a .df through Data Administration as outlined in Step 1 and 3 below.

Since OpenEdge 11, when the Primary Index has already been marked inactive, without first marking another of the active indexes as the Primary Index, it cannot be dropped. It can only be made active again with an offline IDXBUILD or an offline IDXACTIVATE provided another active index is available. PSC00364675 / OCTA-4030 has been raised to allow this in OpenEdge 11 but has not been implemented to data (11.7.5)

The following outlines use of the Database Administration utility to load .df files online in OpenEdge 10.2B or earlier:

1. Temporarily make another active index the primary index, if there is a Logical Index this is the smallest index to use
2. Drop the previous primary index
3. Add the previous primary index back
4. Make this index the primary index again

This is best explained through the sports2000 database Customer Table:

• Customer.CustNum is the PRIMARY index, which is currently INACTIVE
• Customer.Name is another index on the Customer Table which is currently ACTIVE

1. Temporarily make another index primary,
2. Drop this previous primary index
Result: CustNum index no longer exits, Name is the Primary index and is still Active
Note: In OpenEdge 11 this step will fail if CustNum was previously marked inactive with error 997:
3. Add the previous Primary Index back
Result: CustNum Index is added back and is now the Primary Unique Active Index

The index now needs to be rebuilt:

An online method to build a Primary (or any) ACTIVE index is to move it to another area (then back again as an Optional Step):
Otherwise, the .df loaded in Step 3 could be split:

• First add the index back as inactive.
• Then use IDXACTIVATE to build and activate the index
• Finally load a .df to make this index the Primary Index again

There's nothing 'preventing' schema changes online for a replication enabled source database vs a non replication enabled database (the rules are the same) and the schema change is replicated to the target database.
The only factor in a replication environment is that a schema lock first needs to be granted, which is why setting schema-Lock-Action=force as opposed to "wait" in the repl.properties configuration is advised. For further information refer to Article  Can't update schema while OpenEdge Replication is active   

Progress Articles:  

 How to rebuild all Primary Indexes with IDXBUILD or IDXFIX  
 Can inactive indexes be built online?   
 How to deactivate indexes within a Progress database   
 Considerations to keep an OpenEdge database running   
 Building indexes with After-Imaging enabled   
 Considerations adding INACTIVE indexes to source replication enabled databases