The intent of the CHECKPOINT option and the related RESTART INDEX ANALYSIS statement is to establish safeguards for long running INITIATE INDEX ANALYSIS requests for cases where you want to ensure that you do not have to restart the analysis from the beginning if the request unexpectedly aborts. See RESTART INDEX ANALYSIS.
The TIMELIMIT option permits you to place a time limit on the index analysis. Note that you must be willing to accept the best recommendations found up to that point if you specify this option.
Depending on the size and complexity of the defined workload, the operations undertaken by an INITIATE INDEX ANALYSIS request can be very resource-intensive. The process of repeatedly calling the Optimizer with different sets of candidate indexes incurs heavy CPU usage in the Parsing Engine. You should not use this statement on a production system.
INITIATE PARTITION ANALYSIS and INITIATE INDEX ANALYSIS are related statements in the sense that both first examine a workload and then make recommendations to improve performance. You can submit one or both of these statements in either order for a given workload.