Many DDL operations on tables and indexes (CREATE, ALTER, and DROP statements) can be performed online. See Section 14.13, “InnoDB and Online DDL” for details.

Online DDL support for adding secondary indexes means that you can generally speed up the process of creating and loading a table and associated indexes by creating the table without secondary indexes, then adding secondary indexes after the data is loaded.

Use TRUNCATE TABLE to empty a table, not DELETE FROM tbl_name. Foreign key constraints can make a TRUNCATE statement work like a regular DELETE statement, in which case a sequence of commands like DROP TABLE and CREATE TABLE might be fastest.

Because the primary key is integral to the storage layout of each InnoDB table, and changing the definition of the primary key involves reorganizing the whole table, always set up the primary key as part of the CREATE TABLE statement, and plan ahead so that you do not need to ALTER or DROP the primary key afterward.