If this is a write-mostly, query-infrequently table, indexing could significantly degrade performance. For log/audit files that record large numbers of miscellaneous value, indexing the values is rarely an effective strategy.

When this is generally correct, I don't really see a reason why a person want to "sort by" some column containing some miscellaneous values. If unfortunately that's the case, then should look into the data, and have some sort of key information extracted.

Any way, I believe blakem has his stuff well organized, and what he is doing is reasonable.