I have a table that looks like: CREATE TABLE `connections` ( `connection_id` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, `service_id` smallint(5) unsigned DEFAULT NULL, `parent_id` bigint(20) unsigned DEFAULT NULL, `child_id` bigint(20) unsigned DEFAULT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`connection_id`), UNIQUE KEY `primary_child` (`parent_id`,`child_id`), UNIQUE KEY `child_primary` (`child_id`,`parent_id`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8; I need to do lookups on child_id and get information about parent_id and vice versa. Ie: SELECT COUNT(`parent_id`) FROM `connections` WHERE `child_id` = 'x' or SELECT COUNT(`child_id`) FORM `connections` WHERE `parent_id` = 'x' And some more advanced queries like: SELECT DISTINCT `parent_id` FROM `connections` `c1` INNER JOIN `connections` `c2` ON `c1`.`parent_id` = `c2`.`parent_id` WHERE `c1`.`child_id` = 'x' AND `c2`.`child_id` = 'y' I'm looking to get a better idea of the most efficient index structure to get quick responses from all the above query examples. It should be noted that the child/parent pairs will be unique. Thanks,