Are page numbers of a book a good analogy for a clustered index?
Unfortunately I don't think there is a proper StackExchange for theoretical questions, but hopefully you gather good enough information here
Typically the &quot;Phonebook&quot; makes for a good analogy of how indexes work, not only because of the pages sorted by Names (i.e. the nodes of the B-Tree) but the sorting of the LastName, FirstName of the individual People within a specific page being representative of the leaves of the B-Tree. Brent Ozar has a good in-depth article on how indexing works that utilizes this analogy.