title: Copying database with or without indexing on?
body: <p>This should really be a community wiki page, but I have to ask this question and see what I might be missing.  I'm a moderator on a site and they are going through a new site transition. </p>
  
  <p>They started data migration yesterday around lunch.  It's still going on and they say it's going to take 30 more hours.  It's a rather large site (700 million records going from SQL Server to MySQL) but I couldn't fathom why it was taking so long.  </p>
  
  <p>I just found out that they're indexing on the fly.  Are there benefits to this?  Would it not be quicker and probably safer to copy and then index?  If anyone has links, I'll most likely choose that as the answer.  Thanks.</p>