How does indexing work in purple?

Question

I found that when I reindex from the backend, magento creates a lot of extra table. what kind of puppy is this?

eg. catalog_category_flat_store_1 catalog_product_flat_1 catalog_product_index_price_final_idx

Answer 1

Flat tables are designed for different stores in Magento. Each store will have its own flat table, as each store may have different information for it.

As far as I know, the price index is used to speed up category pages, since it would be slower to use the actual price model for these pages.

For the most part, all indexes in Magento increase the overall system speed.