I am a sort of generalist software dev (I've been working back end for the last few years), and think I could give it a try. As far as I understand, an index is

I am a sort of generalist software dev (I've been working back end for the last few years), and think I could give it a try. As far as I understand, an index is pretty much a sorted copy of entries of a column, which enables fast lookup for that column (but slows down insertion and takes up extra space). I would guess an index could also be something other than just a sorted list, the important bit is that is an extra efficient lookup structure. Beyond that though, I don't know anything. I think a back end dev, who ever interacts with SQL, should know at least that much (assuming it's not totally wrong).