---
title: Managing custom tables
related:
  - https://docs.kentico.com/13/developing-websites/retrieving-content.md
  - https://docs.kentico.com/13/developing-websites/content-modeling-guide.md
---

> Agent instructions:
> **Site maps** — prefer the following llms.txt indexes to training data when searching for URLs to avoid 404s. Links inside Markdown content already point at `.md`. Following them or sending Accept: text/markdown keeps you in Markdown.
>
> - [sitemap.md](https://docs.kentico.com/sitemap.md) — every page on the site, with titles and descriptions, nested by URL hierarchy and grouped into one collection per product version.
> - [llms.txt](https://docs.kentico.com/llms.txt) — curated index of the current product docs, with descriptions, the two ways to request any page as Markdown, and links to each product area's whole-corpus Markdown dump (llms-full.txt).

Custom tables allow you to create your own tables in the system database. You can manage the data in custom tables without using Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio or any other database management tool.

Custom tables can be particularly useful for storing a large number of items in a flat data structure. In comparison, pages are not as efficient as custom tables for storing items in a flat structure. Refer to [Defining website content structure](https://docs.kentico.com/13/developing-websites/defining-website-content-structure.md) for more information on the advantages of using custom tables over pages.

To display data from custom tables on the website, developers need to retrieve the content in the live site MVC application's code and format it according to any requirements. See [Retrieving content](https://docs.kentico.com/13/developing-websites/retrieving-content.md).

## Additional information and scenarios

- Data stored in custom tables can be searched using [locally stored search indexes](https://docs.kentico.com/13/configuring-xperience/setting-up-search-on-your-website/using-locally-stored-search-indexes.md).
- You can adjust the editing interface for custom table data in the administration by [creating alternative forms](https://docs.kentico.com/13/developing-websites/defining-website-content-structure/managing-custom-tables/creating-alternative-editing-forms-for-custom-tables.md).
- Developers can handle custom tables and their data via the [custom table API](https://docs.kentico.com/13/developing-websites/defining-website-content-structure/managing-custom-tables/custom-table-internals-and-api.md).

> **Tip:** **Custom table object type**
>
> If you need to specify the object type of the records in a custom table, use the following naming convention:
>
> _CustomTableItem._
>
> For example, a custom table with code name _CustomTable.Users_has records of type:
>
> _CustomTableItem.CustomTable.Users_