If there are random insertions into or deletions from the indexes of a table, the indexes may become fragmented. Fragmentation means that the physical ordering of the index pages on the disk is not close to the index ordering of the records on the pages, or that there are many unused pages in the 64-page blocks that were allocated to the index.
One symptom of fragmentation is that a table takes more space
than it “should” take. How much that is exactly, is
difficult to determine. All InnoDB
data and
indexes are stored in B-trees, and their fill factor may vary
from 50% to 100%. Another symptom of fragmentation is that a
table scan such as this takes more time than it
“should” take:
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM t WHERE a_non_indexed_column <> 12345;
(In the preceding query, we are “fooling” the SQL optimizer into scanning the clustered index rather than a secondary index.) Most disks can read 10MB/s to 50MB/s, which can be used to estimate how fast a table scan should be.
It can speed up index scans if you periodically perform a
“null” ALTER TABLE
operation, which causes MySQL to rebuild the table:
ALTER TABLE tbl_name
ENGINE=INNODB
Another way to perform a defragmentation operation is to use mysqldump to dump the table to a text file, drop the table, and reload it from the dump file.
If the insertions into an index are always ascending and records
are deleted only from the end, the InnoDB
filespace management algorithm guarantees that fragmentation in
the index does not occur.
User Comments
FYI: The above ALTER statement gets a syntax error in version 4.1.0-Alpha, but it works in 4.1.16-Production.
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