Re: alter table ... order by ...

[Gordon Bruce]

With this kinid of insert volume you might play with

SELECT ... INTO OUTFILE 'outfile_name'

LOAD DATA INFILE 'outfile_name'

I know LOAD DATA runs much faster than an INSERT especially an INSERT...SELECT.

One downside to this approach is you will have to remove the "outfile_name" file after the LOAD DATA, but should be doable if the process is initiated from a script.

One other thought. You may want to think about running multiple parallel "INSERT" processes to minimize the time when some tables have new rows while others do not.