It’s not essential to understand how MySQL® and Percona Server for MySQL build indexes. However, if you have an understanding of the processing, it could help when you want to reserve an appropriate amount of space for data inserts. From MySQL 5.7, developers changed the way they built secondary indexes for InnoDB, applying a bottom-up rather than the top-down approach used in earlier releases. In this post, I’ll walk through an example to show how an InnoDB index is built. At the end, I’ll explain how you can use this understanding to set an appropriate value for innodb_fill_factor.
Index building process
To build an index on a table with existing data, there are the following phases in InnoDB
- Read phase (read from clustered index and build secondary index entries)
- Merge sort phase …