Are seperate indexes needed for lower-comparisons?

[Clemens Eisserer]

Hello,

I would like to do case-insensitive comparisons so I use LOWER:

SELECT name FROM album WHERE LOWER(name) LIKE LOWER('a%') ORDER BY name LIMIT 100;

I have an index on name, unlike postgres mysql does not allow the lower-function specified at index-creation.

Explain gives me the following output:

mysql> explain SELECT name FROM lieferant WHERE LOWER(name) LIKE LOWER('a%') ORDER BY name LIMIT 100;
+----+-------------+-----------+-------+---------------+------------+---------+------+------+--------------------------+
| id | select_type | table     | type  | possible_keys | key        | key_len | ref  | rows | Extra                    |
+----+-------------+-----------+-------+---------------+------------+---------+------+------+--------------------------+
|  1 | SIMPLE      | album | index | NULL          | test_index | 258     | NULL | 1053 | Using where; Using index |
+----+-------------+-----------+-------+---------------+------------+---------+------+------+--------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Do I need to change/optimize something to make this query as fast as possible?
Its used for auto-completition, and although the completition is done asynchrous it would be great if it could run quick.
Does this mean the index is used, is there anything I could do better for this query?

Thank you in advance, lg Clemens