Newbie question regarding opimization

[Anon]

I have two table that looks like this:
Table1
- province
- land
Table2
- province
- nw

Both tables contains 5000 records and most but not all of the provinces in one table can be found in the other table.

Now my problem is that I often need to select all or certain records from either the Table2.nw or the Table1.land columns but ONLY where the province in one table exist in the other.
Heres an example of how I do it today:

SELECT * table1 l,table2 n WHERE l.province=n.province ORDER BY land

This works fine but it takes forever on my slow server. Can anyone please newbieme of how to do this faster ? Maybe by indexes or join in some way ?

[Anon]

Are you sure you want to join two tables with 5000 rows each without limiting the search to certain values? Think about it, the dbms has to compare each of the 5000 rows in the first table to each of the 5000 rows in the second table, roughly 25,000,000 comparisons!

Two other suggestions.

1) Instead of joining on the province itself (which I assume is a character field), add an integer column to one of the tables and store a numerical ID (autoincrement is the easy to generate the IDs). Then store that same id in the other table (see function mysql_insert_id). It is much faster for a dbms to match integers than character strings.

2) Make the ID column an index (or a unique index if that's appropriate) in both tables (the one with the autoincrement should have the ID as its primary key).

Those two changes should make the query very fast.