phpmyadmin, oops

did i mess up?

[Doood]

(pardon my ignorance)
I was trying to look at a database with phpmyadmin but I don't know what I'm doing and may have clicked on the wrong thing.

I tried to open a specific row to look at it and clicked on "change" in the action column but it didn't do anything and I backed out of that, so I clicked on "fulltext" and it said that an index was created for that row. Is that ok?

It said this,
An index has been added on language (Query took 0.2629 sec)
SQL-query : [Edit] [Create PHP Code]
ALTER TABLE `phpads_clients` ADD FULLTEXT (
`language`
)

Apparently there's an index for "language" now, will that adversely affect anything? Everything seems to be fine, but I don't know what the "index" means.

[m_shroom]

Indexes are a seperate files in mysql that aid in speeding up your querys, but every update or insert causes this file to be updated also which takes time, so indexes are a mixed blessing.
For best performance you should only index columns that are used in where statments.

[Doood]

Ok, so should I leave it as is, or try to delete the index that was accidentally created?

[bobnew32]

If that column is used in a where statement a large amount of the time then no, if not delete it. Up to you. Read m_shroom's post.

[ergophobe]

Keep in mind, though, that he made a *full text* index, which is probably not what he wants. Unless you're planning to do searches that will have phrases or inexact matches, better to delete and add a regular index if needed.

That said, leaving it there doesn't really do any harm.

Tom