An index advice record engine generates and stores index advice records. An index advice policy mechanism allows a user to define an index advice policy that specifies criteria for autonomic index creation. An autonomic index creation mechanism reads the index advice records, compares this information with the criteria in the user-defined index advice policies, and determines whether an index should be created based on the information in the index advice records and the index advice policies. By automating the process of creating indexes according to user-defined policies, the preferred embodiments alleviate human users from most of the work of manually creating indexes.