Random insertions into or deletions from a secondary index can cause the index to 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 non_indexed_column <> 12345;
The preceding query requires MySQL to perform a full table scan, the slowest type of query for a large table.
To speed up index scans, you can periodically perform a
“null” ALTER TABLE
operation, which causes MySQL to rebuild the table:
ALTER TABLE tbl_name ENGINE=INNODB
You can also use
ALTER TABLE
to perform a
“null” alter operation that rebuilds the table.
tbl_name
FORCE
Both ALTER TABLE
and
tbl_name
ENGINE=INNODBALTER TABLE
use
online DDL. For more
information, see Section 17.12, “InnoDB and Online DDL”.
tbl_name
FORCE
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.