Visual Basic® .NET Database Programming

Indexes

An index is a set of one or more fields that you will frequently use for locating records. For example, you might want to locate records in the Customers table using the customers’ names. To make that easier, you could make the CustomerName field an index.

Sometimes you might also want to locate records using a customer’s address. To make that easier, you could designate the Street, City, State, and Zip fields as an index.

When you define an index, the database builds special data structures that make searching the table using the index faster. For example, this data structure might be a tree holding the values in the indexed field. To find a record with a particular value, the database would search the tree. The result would point ...