Common Interview Question: When Does a MySQL Index Fail? Hands‑On Demo
This article walks through a mini‑project that creates a student table, adds indexes, populates it with 100 k rows, and then demonstrates six concrete scenarios—such as leading wildcards, arithmetic on indexed columns, functions, type mismatches, composite‑index misuse, and encoding differences—that cause MySQL indexes to become ineffective, showing the EXPLAIN output for each case.
