When doing a bulk insert/update/change to a MySQL table you can temporarily disable index updates like this:

ALTER TABLE $tbl_name DISABLE KEYS

…do stuff…

ALTER TABLE $tbl_name ENABLE KEYS

From the docs:

ALTER TABLE ... DISABLE KEYS tells MySQL to stop updating non-unique indexes. ALTER TABLE ... ENABLE KEYS then should be used to re-create missing indexes. MySQL does this with a special algorithm that is much faster than inserting keys one by one, so disabling keys before performing bulk insert operations should give a considerable speedup. Using ALTER TABLE ... DISABLE KEYS requires the INDEX privilege in addition to the privileges mentioned earlier.
While the non-unique indexes are disabled, they are ignored for statements such as SELECT and EXPLAIN that otherwise would use them.

Posted July 1, 2008 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Technology. Tags: ALTER TABLE, DISABLE KEYS, ENABLE KEYS, mysql, optimization.

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