When deciding when and how to create an index in your MySQL database, it's important to consider how the data is being used. Let's say you have a database of students . We will create it like this: CREATE TABLE `students` ( `id` int ( 11 ) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT , `first_name` varchar ( 255 ) DEFAULT NULL , `last_name` varchar ( 255 ) DEFAULT NULL , `class` varchar ( 255 ) DEFAULT NULL , PRIMARY KEY ( `id` ) ) ENGINE = InnoDB Indexes are best used on columns that are frequently used in where clauses, and in any kind of sorting, such as "order by". You should also pay attention to whether or not this information will change frequently, because it will slow down your updates and inserts. Since you wont frequently be adding students, you don't have to worry about the inserts Let's say that you will be looking up the students with a web interface and the end user will be typing in the students name to find them, since r