What is the difference between Generating Text Index and Index Suggestion

[MGanon]

What is the difference between Generating Text Index and Index Suggestion?

[Chuck Tomasi]

An index suggestion analyzes and reports suggested database indexes that can address performance issues (aka slow queries). 

A text index is what's used to do text searches.

Index suggestions for slow queries | ServiceNow Docs

Enable text indexing for a table | ServiceNow Docs

[MGanon]

I read those documents but they are not clear about what exactly will improve. Is enabling text indexing for improving user-called queries, like searching for incidents with a certain description, while index suggestions are for improving background GlideRecord queries like those called in a Script Includes?

[Chuck Tomasi · Accepted solution]

Text indexing is what allows you to search on text fields for a table. If you want to be able to search, you need to activate text indexing on the table. It really has nothing to do with performance.

Index suggestions is about improving performance where the system finds slow queries. It says "Hey, you seem to query this field a lot when you import, perhaps you should create a database index on that field for better import performance".

Does that help?