Indexing varchar column to search for first letter I'm trying to optimize a legacy web-app where users can ask for a list of all records whose name starts with a given character.

The query to optimize is:

SELECT oggetto.id_oggetto, titolo, anno, specifiche from oggetto inner join oggetto_formato on (oggetto.id_oggetto = oggetto_formato.id_oggetto)
            where attivato=1 and oggetto.titolo like 'C%' and id_formato IN ('6', '7', '4') order by titolo LIMIT 650,50;


Sorry for the italian.... 
oggetto means item and titolo is title. I want to speed up the lookup on oggetto.titolo.

EXPLAIN EXTENDED tells me the following:

+----+-------------+-----------------+-------+-----------------------------------------+-----------------+---------+------------------------------+------+----------+-----------------------------+
| id | select_type | table           | type  | possible_keys                           | key             | key_len | ref                          | rows | filtered | Extra                       |
+----+-------------+-----------------+-------+-----------------------------------------+-----------------+---------+------------------------------+------+----------+-----------------------------+
|  1 | SIMPLE      | oggetto         | ALL   | PRIMARY                                 | NULL            | NULL    | NULL                         | 42585|   100.00 | Using where; Using filesort |
|  1 | SIMPLE      | oggetto_formato | ref   | PRIMARY,FK_oggetto_formato_2,id_oggetto | PRIMARY         | 4       | agorateca.oggetto.id_oggetto |    1 |   100.00 | Using where; Using index    |
+----+-------------+-----------------+-------+-----------------------------------------+-----------------+---------+------------------------------+------+----------+-----------------------------+


I created the following index:

CREATE INDEX title_initial ON item (title(2));


The result of EXPLAIN EXTENDED for the above query after creating the index is:

    +----+-------------+-----------------+-------+-----------------------------------------+-----------------+---------+------------------------------+------+----------+-----------------------------+
    | id | select_type | table           | type  | possible_keys                           | key             | key_len | ref                          | rows | filtered | Extra                       |
    +----+-------------+-----------------+-------+-----------------------------------------+-----------------+---------+------------------------------+------+----------+-----------------------------+
    |  1 | SIMPLE      | oggetto         | range | PRIMARY,iniziale_titolo                 | iniziale_titolo | 9       | NULL                         | 2880 |   100.00 | Using where; Using filesort |
    |  1 | SIMPLE      | oggetto_formato | ref   | PRIMARY,FK_oggetto_formato_2,id_oggetto | PRIMARY         | 4       | agorateca.oggetto.id_oggetto |    1 |   100.00 | Using where; Using index    |
    +----+-------------+-----------------+-------+-----------------------------------------+-----------------+---------+------------------------------+------+----------+-----------------------------+


Could anyone confirm my opinion that the index is set up correctly and is doing its job?
I'm not sure what DBMS you are using but in general yes.  It looks like your index is doing what it is supposed to.  As a general case the optimizers can take advantage of an index in a "like" query if there are no pattern (_%[] etc) characters on the left hand side.

So this will use an index

oggetto.titolo like 'C%'


But this could not

oggetto.titolo like '%C'