>Thanks Borislav, that's it.
>The decision to use non-production indexes was made before my time...
>I think one reason was to speed up appends by disabling indexing.
>
>Howard

WHAT?
How many APPEND's you have in the application?
If you change APPEND BLANK->REPLACE to INSERT INTO the index will be updated when the INSERT finish its job.
Even if you didn't use nonstructural compound index you have to REINDEX after the APPEND, so no speed gain.
If that INDEX is opened again no speed gain because it is reindexed automaticaly.
If you use structural compound index your life will be much easier.
No need to care if the index is updated -> it is.
It will be used for Optimization (I am not sure about if nonstructural compound index could be used for this, because I never used them).