The present disclosure provides solutions for determining the divergence (delta) between the current and previous reference data structures for mutable data in a search head. A method is provided that includes updating a pre-existing lookup table in a search head, generating a delta file that identifies the divergence between the updated and previous lookup table, and distributing the delta file to other components in the search environment. The compatibility of the delta file is checked with the local instance of the lookup table in each search component, and the lookup table is applied if compatibility is determined. However, if the delta file is determined to not be compatible with the current version of a local lookup table in an indexer, the entire lookup table sent to the requesting indexer instead.