Optimize SQL databases by adding index columns

Posted by Viktor Sehr on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Viktor Sehr
Published on 2010-05-26T11:47:56Z Indexed on 2010/05/26 11:51 UTC
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This might be implementation specific so the question regards how SQL databases is generally implemented.

Say I have a database looking like this;

Product with columns [ProductName] [Price] [Misc] [Etc]
Order with columns [OrderID] [ProductName] [Quantity] [Misc] [Etc] 

ProductName is primary key of Product, of some string type and unique.
OrderID is primary key and of some integer type, and ProductName being a foreign key.

Say I change the primary key of Product to a new column of integer type ie [ProductID]

Would this reduce the database size and optimize lookups joining these two tables (and likewise operations), or are these optimizations performed automatically by (most/general/main) SQL database implementations?

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