Glossary
Plain-language definitions of the Windows Search index and ESE database terms used in our guides.
- Dirty shutdown (ESE)
- State of an ESE database whose header says it was not closed cleanly: committed changes may exist only in its transaction logs until they are replayed.
- esentutl
- Built-in Windows command-line utility for ESE databases: header dump, soft recovery from logs, integrity check, repair, compaction and shadow-copy copy.
- Extensible Storage Engine (ESE)
- Microsoft's embedded transactional database engine, also called JET Blue, used by Windows.edb, SRUDB.dat, WebCacheV01.dat, Active Directory and Exchange.
- FILETIME
- Windows 64-bit timestamp counting 100-nanosecond intervals since 1 January 1601 UTC, used for the dates stored in the Windows Search index.
- System.ItemPathDisplay
- The Windows shell property holding the user-friendly full path of an item; in the search index it is the path you quote for a file, share or mail item.
- System.Search.AutoSummary
- Windows Search property holding an automatic summary of a document's text content: in practice an extract that can survive after the file is deleted.
- System.Search.GatherTime
- Windows Search property recording when the gatherer last pushed an item's properties to the index: the indexer's own timestamp, separate from file system times.
- Windows.db
- The SQLite database that holds the Windows Search property store on Windows 11, with its write-ahead log Windows.db-wal and companion Windows-gather.db.
- Windows.edb
- The ESE database that holds the Windows Search index from Windows Vista to Windows 10, stored in ProgramData\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Windows.
- Windows-gather.db
- Windows 11 SQLite database holding the Windows Search gatherer tables SystemIndex_Gthr and SystemIndex_GthrPth: crawled documents and the folder scope tree.
- Windows Search service (WSearch)
- The Windows service that crawls indexed locations and maintains the search index database (Windows.edb or Windows.db) used by Start and File Explorer.
- WorkId
- The numeric identifier of an item in the Windows Search property store; it matches the DocumentID of the gather table and links both halves of the index.
- Write-ahead log (SQLite WAL)
- The -wal file where SQLite appends committed pages before a checkpoint copies them into the database; on Windows 11 it holds the newest index data.