Indexes

[Michael Widenius]

>>>>> "Bill" == Bill Koob <wkoob@stripped> writes:

Bill> Just curious I created an index using ALTER
Bill> on a single 10 character field - it took
Bill> 6 1/2 hours on a 800Meg table with 10+ million
Bill> records. 100 Pentium.  All seems to work
Bill> very well (just very slow). 

Note that ALTER TABLE will recreate all indexes, not only the new one.
You can make this MUCH faster by increasing your key_buffer a lot

Bill> Qestion: Would it have saved a significant
Bill> amount of time had I created the index at
Bill> the time I created the table and before
Bill> loading the data?

no.  The MySQL manual has however a couple of tricks involving isamchk 
that you can use to add indexes much faster.

Regards,
Monty