Index

In IBM® Content Manager OnDemand, an index is a key that points to a document. An index allows more efficient access to documents by creating a direct path to a document through pointers.

You define indexes when you create an application group. The indexes should contain information that uniquely identify a document, such as date, account number, and customer name. Indexes are populated by values extracted from a report when you load a report on the system. Each row in an application group table identifies one document.

However, keep in mind that you do not want lots of indexes on a report just to have indexes. You should have a good business reason to have an index. While indexes can help you find documents faster, having too many of them can slow you down when you load reports on the system. Every time you add a new row (document) to a table, you have to add a row to each and every one of the indexes for that table. So the more indexes that you have, the longer it may take when you load a report.

The SQL optimizer automatically chooses the most efficient way to access data in tables. The optimizer takes indexes into consideration when determining the fastest access path to data.