title: Auto-completion for names against a SQL database
body: <p>I have a text field in my web app where I want to do auto-completion (e.g. the user types "St" and I can suggest "Steve").  The names I'm matching against are in a SQL database table of users.  My question is, how can I make this happen in a way that will scale to massive amounts of users?</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>There's DB full text search or something like Lucene.  Would that even be appropriate for a "starts with" query like this?</p></li>
  <li><p>Is there a way to set up a normal DB index for "starts with" type searches?</p></li>
  <li><p>Any other ideas that I'm totally missing?</p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Any help would be appreciated.  Thanks.</p>