Index Number:

An index number expresses the relative changes in price, quantity, or value compared to base
period.

Advantages of Index Number:

Easier to comprehend than actual numbers (percent change).

Facilitate comparison of unlike series.
Provide convenient ways to express the change in the total of a heterogeneous group of

items.
Increased performance: There is no need to access a row in the database from an index

structure, so you can reduce the total number of I/O operations needed to retrieve data.
Reduced table space: Because you do not need to link to a row in a table, there is no need

to store the ROWID in the index. The overall space required for the table is reduced.
Presorted data: The data in the leaf nodes is already sorted by the value of the primary

key.
Unique indexes guarantee uniquely identifiable records in the database.
They make it possible to quickly retrieve (fetch) data.

Disadvantages of Index Number:

There must has a primary key on the table with a unique value.
There is no any other indexes on the data.
Its not possible to give partition an index-organized table.
An index-organized table cannot be a part of a cluster.
Index numbers decrease performance on inserts, updates, and deletes.
They take up space (this increases with the number of fields used and the length of the

fields).
They may be useful for one purpose but not for other.
There may be errors in the choice of base periods or weights etc.