>I've heard people refer to 'natural order' of tables, and I'm unclear as to what it means. My boss seems to think that it refers to the order that data is most frequently accessed. Because of this, he plans on writing a program that copies the records from our frequently-traversed tables into the order that they are most frequently traversed (by policy number). He suspects that this will improve seek time of the read/write heads of the server. I'm skeptical that this will make any difference, so I figured I'd investigate but was unable to find anything conclusive. So now I turn to you all! :)

This is the order the record have been created. When you use a table, this is the order the record will appear, is you don't have any active tag on.

Maybe someone will correct me, but I never heard anything like that in order to improve performance. If you have a lack of performance, you should look at what is not optimized. If that would be the case, we would be constantly running such a procedure on our data and this would simply make no sense.