Fast Index Creation
A capability first introduced in the InnoDB Plugin, now part of the MariaDB server in 5.5 and higher, that speeds up creation of InnoDB secondary indexes by avoiding the need to completely rewrite the associated table. The speedup applies to dropping secondary indexes also.
Because index maintenance can add performance overhead to many data transfer operations, consider doing operations such as ALTER TABLE ... ENGINE=INNODB or INSERT INTO ... SELECT * FROM ... without any secondary indexes in place, and creating the indexes afterward.
See also index.
See also secondary index.