Microsoft® Access® 2010 Inside Out

Adding Indexes

The more data you include in your tables, the more you need indexes to help Access 2010 search your data efficiently. An index is simply an internal table that contains two columns: the value in the field or fields being indexed and the physical location of each record in your table that contains that value. Access 2010 uses an index similarly to how you use the index in this book—you find the term that you want and jump directly to the pages containing that term. You don’t have to leaf through all the pages to find the information you want.

Let’s assume that you often search your Contacts table by city. Without an index, when you ask Access 2010 to find all the contacts in the city of Chicago, Access has to search every record in ...