A new On Disk Structure (ODS) is available with Domino 8. This is an update from ODS43 to ODS48. First of all, upgrading applications (formerly called databases) to ODS48 is completely optional and requires the addition of a notes.ini setting on the server (or client).

You must add the parameter Create_R8_Databases=1 to the notes.ini file to enable ODS 48 (Version 8) as the default, Create_R8_Databases=0 disabled ODS 48.

This setting affects only NSFs; it has no effect on DB2-enabled Notes databases. Pre-Domino 8 servers ignore this setting, so it is safe to set this parameter even in a mixed version environment.