[donatj]

I still think about my first job out of college. Shopping cart application, we would add indexes exclusively when there was a problem rather than proactively based on expected usage patterns. It's genuinely a testament to MySQL that we got as far as we did without knowing anything about what we were doing.

One of my most popular StackOverflow questions to this day is about how to handle one million rows in a single MySQL table (shudder).

The product I work on now collects more rows than that a day in a number of tables.