Alternate key is a great addition to useful features in dynamics crm. I have blogged about it here : Work With Alternate Keys

In this blog I just want to quickly show resolution when you create an alternate key and its corresponding job stays in “Pending” Status.

I.e Consider an example of my entity. On my customer entity I have a contact reference field  which I would like to be unique. hence I decide to create an alternate key. So I go to Settings > Customizations > Customize the System > Entity > My Enity > Key and create a new one by adding the contact reference field:

1. Create new alternate key and add the required field:
2. Click Save and Close. you will see job is created and shows you status. However even after waiting for minutes , it shows as “Pending” the expect status should be “Activated”.
   
3. click on the job:
   
4. But there also , you wont see anything 😦
   

Reason & Resolution

There are two possibilities:

1. Since creating an alternate key essentially creates indexing on the table in the database. It will fail if duplicate records are already there.To remove duplicates either use advanced find to manually delete or update records or duplicate detection job to delete the record, see here :Set up duplicate detection rules to keep your data clean
2. Other reason I can think of is the job is stuck may be due to some CRM Async Service. Try to delete and recreated the alternate key.
   If you are onpremise – you can restart async service and see if that works.

For me 1st one was the issue. I deleted the records with same contact reference number and it worked:

Now I could create the key and it was activated:

I hope this helps!