A short recap of what happened. I am working with 71 million records (not much compared to billions of records processed by others). On a different thread, someone suggested that the current setup of my cluster is not suitable for my need. My table structure is:
CREATE TABLE `IPAddresses` (
`id` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
`ipaddress` bigint(20) unsigned default NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM;
And I added the 71 million records and then did a:
ALTER TABLE IPAddresses ADD INDEX(ipaddress);
It's been 14 hours and the operation is still not completed. Upon Googling, I found that there is a well-known approach for solving this problem - Partitioning. I understand that I need to partition my table now based on the ipaddress but can I do this without recreating the entire table? I mean, through an ALTER statement? If yes, there was one requirement saying that the column to be partitioned on should be a primary key. I will be using the id of this ipaddress in constructing a different table so ipaddress is not my primary key. How do I partition my table given this scenario?