>Cindy,
>
>A minor correction, the issue is not how many different values the field many have, it is the distribution of those values. For example, a gender field for a table of 1,000,000 records that is used to stored the students registered at Vassar may not be a good candidate for an index because 99.999999999% of the fields are F. However the same field for a table of students registered at UCONN may indeed benefit from an index as the distribution of values is more even.
>
>The issue of the index on deleted is that in most situations the distribution of values for deleted is heavily uneven in favor of the non-deleted records.

Thanks Jim. I wasn't entirely clear on that one.