Hi there,

If you know your way around MySQL, you can create an index on a part of a column so you can actually index the first three or four characters (do mind yourself you cannot make this an unique index)

The statement shown here creates an index using the first 4 characters of the name column:

CREATE INDEX part_of_name ON customer (name(4));

Ref: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/...ate-index.html

Cheers,

DragonBe