Will Dropping an Index on a Large Table in TiDB Lock the Table?

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This topic has been translated from a Chinese forum by GPT and might contain errors.

Original topic: 删除TiDB大表索引会不会锁表

| username: jingyesi3401

[TiDB Usage Environment] Production, Testing, Research

[TiDB Version] v5.1.0

[Encountered Problem] Currently, the system has a large table where the index occupies a significant amount of storage space. We are planning to delete an unnecessary index to free up disk space. Will deleting the index lock the table?

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| username: h5n1 | Original post link

Without locking the table, TiDB’s DDL is an asynchronous schema change, which is lock-free. However, the space will only be released after the GC following a drop index operation.