How to make an index in InDesign CC 2014.1 using a topics list?

Question

Hi all,
I have read the long help document on how to make an index in InDesign CC 2014.1 using a topics list, and still can't work out what to do.
I have done a 548 page book, using a document for each chapter, and a book file to put them all together in the right order.
I now need to make an index at the back, as the author has many quotes throughout the book at the start of each chapter and section.
I have a list of those people quoted and want to upload this list and get the index feature in InDesign to find all instances of the name occurring in the entire book.
After reading the help document I still cannot work out how to do this.
My questions are:
1. Do you have to use an InDesign document as a source for the list of topics? If so, should the document be added to the book file or outside it?
It seems a bit recursive to have the list of topics in an ID document that is in the book file.
2. Once you have uploaded the topics into the Index feature, how do you get it to look for all instances of that 'topic' througout the entire book? I can't figure that out from the help documents. What do I select? Do I do it from the Index panel? Do I highlight the text in the source document? Not sure how to do this...
3. I need the names to list surname first of the quoted authors in the index. This command seems to be different between various editions of ID. For ID CC 2014.1 is it ctrl+alt+shift+]
4. To make the surname show first, what do I highlight? The topic? and then do ctrl+alt+shift+] and select find all as well? Or do I have to just go through the text and manually do this and ditch the idea of uploading topics first?
I am confused as you can see and any help with this is appreciated.

Answer 1

Sorry 007, I really thought you were posting a trick question as on the OCP tests.
Anyway, as Justin mentioned, if you have an index on ename, it may be used when doing a comparison predicate statement with the ename value.
What it depends on are several other things: stats, how many rows in the table, use of an index hint, etc.
Rather than questioning the group on this, why not just turn on autotrace and run the query for the different scenarios.
The output will show you if it used the index, number of rows returned, blocks read, etc.
SQL> create table emp (ename  varchar2(40));
Table created.
SQL> insert into emp select username from sys.dba_users;
25 rows created.
SQL> commit;
Commit complete.
SQL> set autotrace on
SQL> select * from emp where ename != 'SYSTEM';
Execution Plan
Plan hash value: 2951343571
| Id  | Operation        | Name      | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT |           |    24 |   528 |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  1 |  INDEX FULL SCAN | ENAME_IDX |    24 |   528 |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
   1 - filter("ENAME"<>'SYSTEM')As you can see, the above used an index, even though there were only 25 rows in the table.
You can test each of your scenarios, one by one, including use of a hint.