Indexes are important. Not only that, they are vastly important. No single structure aids in retrieving data from a database more than an index. Indexes represent both how data is stored and the access paths by which data can be retrieved from your database. Without indexes, a database is an unordered mess minus the roadmap to find the information you seek. Throughout my experience with customers, one of the most common resolutions that I provide for performance tuning and application outages is to add indexes to their databases. Often, the effort of adding an index or two to the primary tables within a database provides significant.
