title: What is the point of indexing in pandas?
body: <p>Can someone point me to a link or provide an explanation of the benefits of indexing in pandas? I routinely deal with tables and join them based on columns, and this joining/merging process seems to re-index things anyway, so it's a bit cumbersome to apply index criteria considering I don't think I need to.</p>
  
  <p>Any thoughts on best-practices around indexing?</p>