Hi There,
The data needs to be sorted into the key you specified. Any RDBMS does this type of operation. Some don;t copy the whole table though, just the columns you are indexing
Cheers
Chris
Chris,
Ok, I see your point. Some of the other databases I've used will simply read the data from the table and creates the index from that. They don't need to sort the table which creates a large intermediate table and a lot of disk I/O. The delay probably isn't noticeable to most people unless their tables have millions or rows in them. I suppose MySQL sorts the data first so it can build the branches of the index better (similar index values are adjacent). I wish there was some way of speeding it up, because I wouldn't want to do it very often with a 7gb table. There's only so much coffee a guy can drink.<g>
Mike
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