If i'm using soft delete in laravel 4.2 (database is mysql), every eloquent query has WHERE deleted_at IS NULL. There are no indexes on deleted_at. Will it be slow on big tables? (or maybe IS NULL is optimized without needing an index) Should I add an index on the deleted_at column? So, does Laravel's "soft_delete" deleted_at column need an index in MySQL? Clarification: Laravel stores a timestamp