When to drop indexes

To drop indexes or not to drop indexes, that is the question.

When deleting or inserting a lot of rows for a table I've been told it's usually better to drop all it's indexes, make your changes, then rebuild the indexes. At what point does this become effective? Is there a rule of thumb for determining when it'll take more time to rebuild than to just leave them alone?

For example, suppose I have a snapshot that has approx 1 millions rows in it. There are only two indexes on the snapshot - the snapshot index proper, and a user created index. The snapshot log says there's 54,000 rows to be inserted. Should I drop the user index and rebuild it afterwards? Or should I leave it alone?

TIA

--
Chuck Hamilton
chuckh_at_dvol.com

Never share a foxhole with anyone braver than yourself!