mysql search performance

[ian herbert]

I have a table that contains address' and names etc, it has about 39 columns. All I'm doing right now is searching rows just by zip code and with the amount of rows(~2000) i have right now it performs alright. If I were to import 8 million rows into that table and search the table for zip code which is currently a varchar I am assuming it will perform very slowly.

So lets assume it does perform very slowly, I havn't tested it out yet so I don't know. Would this solution work to speed things up a bit?

If I were to store zips/primary key from the above table in a separate table, have the zip as an integer instead of a varchar, and then search this table for zips. Then gather the rest of the information from the found results through a join to the above table. Would this makes things a bit faster?

Or would this be same thing as making the zip in the original table an indexed column?

Thanks
-Ian