Ask HN: Dirty tricks for faster mysql alter table ?
Mysql is a great program, countless websites wouldn't exist if it weren't for this really neat open source package.<p>One thing I can't get around though is that every time I have to do an 'alter table' on something that has been in production for a while the whole thing stops dead cold as long as it takes it to do its job. And that can be quite long if the table is large enough.<p>There are a few dirty tricks out there to speed things up a bit, the most frequently used one builds an empty 'shell' table with the right structure but without the indexes and then uses the repair facility to recreate them. It's a little faster, but even that is too long in all but the simplest cases.<p>Is there a better way to do this ?<p>I'm about to 'do it again' on a production table with 50M rows in it and I really am not looking forward to taking things down while doing this.