MySQL - speed up execution of ALTER TABLE I have a MySQL DB with innoDB tables. the DB size is about 30GB. I am using ALTER TABLE table_name CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci; to change all the tables characters set and it takes forever!!
is there a way to speed up the process?
create a new table like your source table.
alter that new table the way you want.  
insert your data into the new table.
create indexes etc. as needed on the new table.
rename your old table to something like ..._old or whatever.
rename your new table to the former name of the old one.
copy any missing rows from the _old table to the new one.
done :)