I have a very large table with around 1M records. Due to bad performance, I have optimized the queries and needed to change the index.
I changed it using ALTER, now I am really not sure how this works in InnoDB. Do I need to restart MySQL server? If I need to restart MySQL server, how do I keep data integrity between tables (so that I don't miss data which is there in memory and did not get written to DB)?
I Googled and found that in the case of MySQL restart, I need to use global variable innodb_fast_shutdown -- what does it do when I set it and what if I don't? It is not very clear.
I am new to MySQL area with InnoDB. Any help is really appreciated.