Indexing design considerations

A significant amount of work has been done in the area of general indexing in terms of simple indexing. This is reflected in the development of access methods such as VSAM. Very little work has been done on complex indexes. The only example given in this paper is the cascading indexes of CICS. Future work could include an expansion of the items discussed under complex indexes. In particular, some attention should be given to the relationships between different sets of data. A limited set of these relationships are provided by hierarchical data structures provided by systems such as the Information Managment System.