The management of indexes—how they are created and maintained—can impact the performance of SQL statements.
Combining Your DDL
An important management requirement when adding indexes to MySQL is the blocking nature of a DDL statement. Historically, the impact of an ALTER statement required that a new copy of the table be created. This could be a significant operation for time and disk volume when altering large tables. With the InnoDB plugin, first available in MySQL 5.1, and with other third party storage engines, various ALTER statements are now very fast, as they do not perform a full table copy. You should refer to the system documentation for the specific storage engine and MySQL version to confirm the full impact of your ALTER statement.
Combining multiple ALTER statements into one SQL statement is an easy optimization improvement. For example, if you needed to add a new index, modify an index, and add a new …
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