Alison Balter's Mastering Access 2002 Enterprise Development

Adding and Modifying Indexes

You use indexes to improve performance when the user searches a field. Although it's generally best to include too many indexes rather than too few, indexes do have downsides. Indexes speed up searching, sorting, and grouping data. The downside is that they take up hard disk space and slow the process of editing, adding, and deleting data. Although the benefits of indexing outweigh the detriments in most cases, you should not index every field in each table. Create indexes only for fields or combinations of fields on which the user will search or sort. Do not create indexes for fields that contain highly repetitive data. A general rule is to provide indexes for all fields regularly used in searching and sorting, and ...