alter index ... disable ?

Is there a way to temporarily disable an index so that a group of updates do not require the index to be unpdated until some later time?

You can do this with a primary constraint index, but I don't see how to do this on other "ordinary" indexes.

I examined the ALTER INDEX command, but it does basically the reverse of what I want. It stops _queries_ from using the index, but INSERT's etc still update the index.

What I want is to stop updating the index until after a load of data has been added. (Obviously queries have to stop using the index, but that's ok).

Right now I DROP the index and then CREATE it afterwards, but that means I have to know the columns of the index. It's easy enough to know the columns, but it would be even easier to simply reference the index by name "TURN INDEX xx OFF" and then "TURN INDEX xx BACK ON", and occasional changes to the indexes would be easier to manage as nothing would change unless you added (or removed) an index, and even then it would still be simpler as just the name of the index would be added or removed.

Suggestions welcome. Received on Fri May 09 2003 - 17:48:03 CDT