It's a composite index. A covering index would be this: ALTER TABLE staff ADD INDEX idx (last_name, first_name); SELECT first_name FROM staff WHERE last_name

It's a composite index. A covering index would be this: ALTER TABLE staff ADD INDEX idx (last_name, first_name); SELECT first_name FROM staff WHERE last_name = 'n'; A covering index is something very special - all results are returned from the index. Not all databases do this - Postgres does not, because it does not want to maintain all the versions (see MVCC in wikipedia) in the index.