Drop is executed within a transaction, which means that every record you touch has to be backed up to the journal first, then modified in the database. I'm guessing that if you use pragma synchronous=off, it would speed up the drop index, but you'd take a chance on corrupting the database if the machine crashed during the drop.
It would probably be faster to make a copy of the database (all sequential I/O), then drop the index with synchronous=off in one of the copies (no journal I/O), then use vacuum if you want to really clean up the DB. If something goes wrong, you still have your backup copy. I haven't actually tried this; let us know if it makes a big difference. Jim On 3/17/09, Nikolas Stevenson-Molnar <steve...@evergreen.edu> wrote: > Hi, > > I'm trying to drop an index on a table with about 8 million rows and > it's taking a very long time. I can understand why building the index > would take some time, but why dropping it? And is there any way to > speed it up? > > Thanks! > _Nik > _______________________________________________ > sqlite-users mailing list > sqlite-users@sqlite.org > http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users > -- Software first. Software lasts! _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@sqlite.org http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
