Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Programming by Example

Introduction to Indexes

You are used to working with indexes in daily life. Many books have a table of contents. This table of contents shows the book's outline, and in this outline, you can see on which page every topic starts. You can read just the table of contents and search for a subject that interests you. After you find an interesting topic, you can quickly go straight to the correct page number.

In this example, the book is organized according to the table of contents. The table of contents is not ordered alphabetically but it is ordered by its outline. If you want to search for a specific topic, you have to search the table of contents sequentially from the beginning to the end.

Every entry in the table of contents can be considered ...