Is indexing the answer MySQL online database thousands of records

I'm soon to have an application that has uses online database (MySQL). I could have many thousands of records in a particular table in my database. Am I going to see a performance hit? What about if I turn on indexing. Is indexing is all handled transparent (it's all handled for me)? Or should good practice be to try and catergorize the data into other tables (such as alphabetically). Isn't this what indexing basically does?

Any other advice... I'm quite new to online conne开发者_StackOverflowctivity. I mostly develop for standalone computer.

Thanks Thomas

you should always index if appropriate but there's not enough information provided to know what should be indexed. Many thousands for any db is not a lot,

Indexes are useful to speed up queries that identfy a tiny subset of all records. Indexes are sorted (well not all types of indexes), which means they may also speed up certain queries where you need the rows in the same order as the columns in the index.

Indexes will not help you if you are selecting larger subsets of the data in your table, other than the special case where the index includes all columns referenced by your query.