Magento 2.3 Removes Need for Flat Catalog for Categories and Products
Since Magento 1, the use of flat catalog tables for categories and products has been a staple for improving performance. These tables get indexed and translate the more complex Entity-Attribute_Value (EAV) model. The flat catalog simplifies the needed data for products and categories.
Starting with Magento 2.3.0 and higher, Magento no longer recommends using the Flat Catalog option. From the Magento User Guide:
Starting with Magento 2.3.0+, the use of a flat catalog is no longer a best practice and is not recommended. Continued use of this feature is known to cause performance degradation and other indexing issues.
** This also assumes you are using Elastic Search, which is also more efficient than using MySQL for the search engine portion of Magento 2.
This is a major change in how to make Magento fast and efficient, as Flat Catalog was always considered to be essential. With 2.3.x and on, and using Elastic Search, this is no longer the case. Using flat catalog tables now can cause issues with indexers failing, taking too long to index, or actually degrading performance, especially for category pages.
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