After a day of looking, I answered my own questions, and I'll post those
answers here in case anyone else was interested in the answer.
First, "LOAD DATA" + "ALTER TABLE ADD INDEX"... seems to be slower than
a "mysqldump" + "ANALYZE TABLE". Of course, you don't always have a
mysql dump file.
A
We have a somewhat large database, with a snapshot of the data that we
import into the database. Normally, we create a database, create the
tables, import the data with "LOAD DATA", add the indexes, and then the
foreign keys (we are using InnoDB, 4.0.18). We call this the
load-data-method.
Som
